Arab Filmmakers of The Middle East

Film and Media Middle East
Jacket illustration: Jmour. India ink and acrylic

painting on linen canvas. Nja Mahdaoui.
All rights reserved.
Arab Filmmakers MECH hi-res.indd 1
Middle East
INDIANA
University Press
Bloomington & Indianapolis
www.iupress.indiana.edu
1-800-842-6796
Arab Filmmakers
of the
Middle East
A Dictionary
of the
from the introduction
Arab Filmmakers
The fragmented history of Arab

Middle Eastern cinemawith its
powerful documentary component
reflects all too clearly the fragmented
history of the Arab peoples and is indeed comprehensible only when this
history is taken into account. While
neighboring countries, such as Turkey, Israel, and Iran, have coherent
national film histories which have
been comprehensively documented,
the Arab Middle East has been given
comparatively little attention.
Armes
Roy Armes is Professor Emeritus of Film

at Middlesex University. He has published
widely on world cinema. He is author of
Dictionary of African Filmmakers (IUP, 2008).
Constitutes a counter-reading of
received views and assumptions
about the absence of Arab cinema
in the Middle East.
Michael T. Martin,
Black Film Center/Archive,
Indiana University
Esential for libraries and useful

for individual readers who will
find essays on subjects rarely treated in English.
Kevin Dwyer,
American University in Cairo
In this landmark dictionary, Roy Armes

details the scope and diversity of filmmaking across the Arab Middle East. Listing
more than 550 feature films by more than
250 filmmakers, and short and documentary
films by another 900 filmmakers, this volume covers the film production in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and the Gulf
States. An introduction by Armes locates
film and filmmaking traditions in the region
from early efforts in the silent era to statefunded productions by isolated filmmakers
and politically engaged documentarians.
Part 1 lists biographical information about
Roy Armes
the filmmakers and their feature films.

Part 2 details key feature films from the
countries represented.
Part 3 indexes feature-film titles in English
INDIANA
and French with details about the director,

date, and country of origin.
6/15/10 10:43 AM
Arab Filmmakers
of the
Middle East
Arab
Filmmakers
of the
Middle East
A Dictionary
R o y A rme s
Indiana University Press

Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press
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Man ufactur ed in the

U nited States of A mer ica
Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication Data
Armes, Roy.
Arab filmmakers of the Middle East :
a dictionary / Roy Armes.
p. cm.
English and French.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 978-0-253-35518-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Motion picture producers and directors
Arab countriesBiographyDictionaries.
2. Motion picture producers and directors
Arab countriesCredits. 3. Motion picture
industryArab countries. I. Title.
PN1993.5.A65A76 2010
791.4302320923927dc22
[B]
2010007348
1 2 3 4 5 15 14 13 12 11 10
For Annie
But we suffer from an incurable disease

called hope. Hope for liberation and
independence. Hope for a normal life
where we shall be neither heroes nor
victims. Hope to see our children go
to school without danger. Hope for
a pregnant woman to give birth to
a living baby, in a hospital, and not
to a dead child in front of a military
control post. Hope that our poets will
see the beauty of the colour red in roses,
rather than in blood. Hope that this
land will recover its original name:
land of hope and peace. Thank you for
carrying with us this banner of hope.
Mahmoud Darwish
Contents
acknowledgments
note on Layout
list of Acronyms
xi
xiii
xv
Introduction:
Filmmaking in Divided Lands

Part 1
Dictionary of Filmmakers

33
Part 2
Feature-Film Chronologies

129
Part 3
Index of Feature-Film Titles

159
bibliography
191
Acknowledgments
Like its predecessor, the Dictionary of African

Filmmakers (Indiana University Press, 2008),
this listing is essentially a work of synthesis. In
compiling it, I have drawn on the full range of
material listed in the bibliography at the end of
this volume. The principal published sources
on which I have drawn, which demand special
mention and which all contain more information on specific films and filmmakers than can
be contained here, are, in order of publication:
Hassan Ab Ghanima, Trente films palestiniens and Filmographies, in Guy Hennebelle
and Khmais Khayati, eds., La Palestine et le
cinma (Paris: E.100, 1977); Claude-Michel
Cluny, Dictionnaire des nouveaux cinmas
arabes (Paris: Sindbad, 1978); Shakir Nouri,
Rpertoire chronologique des longs-mtrages irakiens (19451985), in la recherche du
cinma irakien, 19451985 (Paris: ditions
LHarmattan, 1986); Ibrahim al-Ariss, Mouny
Berrah, Claude Michel Cluny, Jacques Lvy,
and Yves Thoraval, Dictionnaire de 80 cinastes, in Mouny Berrah, Jacques Lvy, and
Claude Michel Cluny, eds., Les cinmas arabes
(Paris: ditions Cerf and Institut du Monde
Arabe, 1987); Alberto Elena, El Cine del tercer
mundo: Diccionario de realizadores (Madrid:
Ediciones Turfan, 1993); Andrea Morini, Erfan Rashid, Anna Di Martino, and Adriano
Apr, Il cinema dei paesi arabi (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 1993); Hady Zaccak, Filmographies, in Le cinma libanais: itinraire dun
cinma vers linconnu (19291996) (Beirut:
Dar el-Machreq, 1997); Sergio Di Giorgi and
Joan Rundo, 19701998: Filmografia essenziale, in Una Terra promessa dal cinema:
Appunti sul nuovo cinema palestinese (Palermo: Edizioni della Battaglia and La Luna nel
Pozzo, 1998); Rebecca Hillauer, Encyclopedia
of Arab Women Filmmakers (Cairo: American

University in Cairo Press, 2005); Hamid Dabashi, A Selected Filmography of Palestinian
Cinema (19272004), in Dreams of a Nation:
On Palestinian Cinema (London: Verso, 2006);
Rasha Salti, Filmmakers Biographies, in Insights into Syrian Cinema: Essays and Conversations with Contemporary Filmmakers (New
York: Rattapallax Press / Arte East, 2006);
and Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi, Filmography, in Palestinian Cinema: Landscape,
Trauma and Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2008).
Equally indispensable have been CinmArabe (Paris, 19761979), International
Film Guide (London, 19642006, 20082010),
Images Nord-Sud (Paris, from 1988), and the
catalogues and web pages of various film festivals: the Arab Film Festival (Los Angeles, annually from 1987); the Biennale des cinmas
arabes (Paris, biennally 19922006); the London Palestine Film Festival (20052006, 2008
2009); the festival Jeunesse du cinma arabe,
the Festival du film arabe, the Deuxime Festival du film arabe, the Troisime Festival du film
arabe, La semaine du cinma arabe (all Paris,
19831987); the Festival: images du monde
arabe (Paris, 1993); Il cinema dei paesi arabi,
Quarta edizione / Arab Film Festival (Naples,
1997); the Dubai International Film Festival
(from 2004); the Jordanian Short Film Festival;
the ArteEast Touring ProgramLens on Syria
(United States, 2006); the Middle East International Film Festival (Abu Dhabi, from 2007);
the Emirates Film Competition (annually from
2001), and the Dreams of a Nation website (on
Palestinian cinema, New York).
Statistics concerning national size, population, and gross domestic product (GDP) are
xii
taken from seven World Factfiles published as
daily supplements to the Guardian in 2009.
Individuals to whom I owe a very real and
specific debt for information and encouragement (beyond the call of duty) are numerous. I
owe a huge debt to Martine Leroy, for access to
her data base on Middle Eastern films. I have
also received stimulus, encouragement, and
help from Rasha Salti, Haim Bresheeth, Lina
Khatib, Maysoon Pachachi, Hazim Bitar, Abdalla Mohammed Bastaki, Hana El Hirsi, Ros
Shotter, and Jaffar Mahajar. I am also endebted to the staff of Indiana University Press, es-
Acknowledgments
pecially Dee Mortensen, June Silay, and copyeditor Sarah Brown.
Moreover, I am deeply grateful to the
Leverhulme Trust for awarding me the second Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship, which
has allowed me to finance both this dictionary
and its predecessor, the Dictionary of African
Filmmakers.
Though I have made every effort to check
the information given, errors and omissions
are inevitable in a work of this nature, and I
would welcome contact from any readers who
can help correct the mistakes and fill the gaps.
Note on Layout
This dictionary concentrates primarily on the

makers of fictional feature films and featurelength documentaries, whose works are listed in the Feature-Film Chronologies and
cross-referenced in the Index of Feature-Film
Titles. But because filmmaking in this area
is so fragmented, I have also included in the
listing of Arab filmmakers in part 1 over 900
short and documentary filmmakers from the
Arab Middle East. Their names are listed at
the end of the relevant feature film chronology, but their work is not indexed. The Arab
Middle East has not developed the kind of
overwhelming output of fictional features on
video, characteristic of Anglophone Africa
(especially Nigeria, where many thousands of
feature-length videos have been produced and
distributed since the 1980s), so I have been
able to include work shot on video (principally Beta SP and more recently HD), as well
as 35mm and 16mm film productions. Reference is also made to the increasing quantity of
documentary material produced by the various Arab satellite television companies and
intended principally for broadcasting. Al
Jazeera English, for example, has of late provided both funding and considerable editorial
freedom for documentary filmmakers from
the wider Arab world. It is interesting too to
note that, despite the technological developments and new promotional strategies which
are likely to lead to a totally different media
situation in the coming decade, the bulk of fictional feature films made in the Arab Middle
East, like those in Africa, continue to be shot
and distributed for initial exhibition purposes
on 35mm film. The catalogues of the twentieth, twenty-first, and twenty-second editions
of the JCC (Journes Cinmatographiques de
Carthage, Tunis, 2004, 2006, and 2008) show

the continued strength and importance of
conventional 35mm filmmaking across Africa
and the Arab world, as well as the growing
number of works, even by established filmmakers, which are digitally produced and
reflect television formats: such as 52-minute
documentaries and fictional works in a miniseries pattern of three 26-minute episodes.
In general, I have included in my chronological listings of fictional features all those
works which are treated as such by the organizers of Arab and international film festivals,
even if the works in question do not, strictly
speaking, fulfill the conventional length requirements of a feature film. With regard to
documentary production (now almost entirely in some digital format or other), I have
excluded from the feature listings all works in
the conventional 52-minute television format,
though such works are referred to, of course,
in the individual filmmaker entries.
As far as the treatment of specific filmmakers is concerned, I have tried to be as
flexible and inclusive as possible, and I have
again adopted the very liberal definitions
used by festivals such as the JCC in Tunis or
the Arab Film Festival (AFF) in Los Angeles
as to what constitutes an Arab filmmaker
and an Arab film. I have therefore included
the work of Arab filmmakers born or living in exile, who reflect in their work on the
problems of living as emigrants, whether in
Europe, Canada, or the United States, while
excludingas far as possibleEuropean and
North American filmmakers with no direct
birth links to the Middle East. In a situation
where so many filmmakers live and work
across national boundaries, even within the
xiv
Middle East, I have followed the filmmakers
own ways of defining themselves and chosen
to group them according to their own or their
parents nationality, rather than by their place
of birth, work, or residence. The result, at the
moment of going to press, is a list of over 550
feature-length works made by around 250 feature filmmakers, whose efforts are backed up
by those of some 900 short and documentary
filmmakers, many of them students graduating from one of the numerous audio-visual
training courses in the area.
This dictionary offers broadly the same
kind of information as that contained in its
predecessor, the Dictionary of African Filmmakers. The work begins with an introduction, which sets out to place the filmmaking
in its historical context. In an area like the
Middle East, which has been constantly torn
by war and internal strife, it seemed to me
crucial to spell out this contextual situation,
because it has had so profound an influence on
the work of all feature filmmakers and has also
led to the production of a mass of committed
documentary filmmaking.
Part 1 comprises an alphabetical listing of
all the Arab filmmakers from the Middle East
whom I have been able to locate. The names of
those who have completed at least one fictional
or documentary feature-length film shot on
35mm, 16mm film, or in some video format
are distinguished by being set in capital letters. Because of the nature of film production
in the Middle East, particularly in, and in relation to, Palestine, the listing of filmmakers includes documentary and short film directors.
Here too I have relaxedas the filmmakers
themselves doany distinction between film
and video productions. Foreign, usually Egyptian, makers of feature films are distinguished
by an asterisk (*) in the alphabetical filmmakers and chronological listings (parts 1 and 2).
Where available for an individual filmmaker,
date and place of birth, training, and/or professional experience, and an indication of any
Note on Layout
other creative activity are given, together with
a listing of short and feature-length films.
Film entries in these director listings include
mention of date, length, and format, where
this information is available.
Part 2 deals in alphabetical order with
the countries to which the feature filmmakers are conventionally aligned. Because of the
minimal amount of feature filmmaking that
has occurred to date in the seven states of the
Gulf, these are grouped together at the end
(though there are huge differences between
Yemen and its royal or princely neighbors).
Each chronology of national feature-film output is preceded by a list of feature filmmakers,
followed by a similar listing of relevant short
and documentary filmmakers, and supplemented by a selection of bibliographical references. The dates of films given here can be
no more than approximate, since I have used a
wide variety of sources, some employing production dates and others using release dates.
In any case, there may be a wide gap between
a films foreign festival screening and its eventual release at home (particularly if there are
censorship problems), and a number of films
have, for whatever reason, obtained no local
commercial release at all.
Part 3 is an index of feature-film titles in
both English and French. In each case, the directors name, the films date, and the country
of origin are given. The Arabic transcriptions
of the film titles are very simplified forms, derived from a variety of national sources and
intended merely to identify and differentiate
films, which, in many cases, do not have formal English or French titles. These transcriptions are not indexed.
The bibliography lists books on relevant
aspects of world cinema and book-length
studies of Arab filmmaking within the Middle
East, as well as a selection of books relating to
the political development of the various countries and areas of the Middle East.
Acronyms
ABC
AFC
AFF
ALBA
CLCF
CNC

DEA
DIFF
EHESS
ESAV
ESEC
ESRA
FAMU
FEMIS
Australian Broadcasting
Corporation
Amman Filmmakers Collective
(Jordan)
Arab Film Festival (Los Angeles)
Acadmie Libanaise des Beaux
Arts (Beirut)
Conservatoire Libre du Cinma
Franais (Paris)
Centre National du Cinma
(Lebanon)
Centre National de
Cinmatographie (Paris)
Diplme dtudes Approfondies
(France)
Dubai International Film
Festival (UAE)
cole des Hautes tudes en
Sciences Sociales (Paris)
cole Suprieure dAudiovisuel
(Toulouse)
cole Suprieure des tudes
Cinmatographiques (Paris)
cole Suprieure de Ralisation
Audiovisuelle (Paris)
Filmov Akademie Mzickych
Umen (Film and Television
Faculty of the Academy
of Performing Arts)
(Czechoslovakia)
Fondation Europenne des
Mtiers de lImage et du Son
(Paris)
FLN
GDP
IDHEC
IESAV
INSAS
IT
JCC
JSFF
LAU
MEIFF
NFS
OGC
OGCT
OPEC
PFLP
Front de Libration Nationale

(Algeria)
gross domestic product
Institut des Hautes tudes
Cinmatographiques (Paris)
Institut dtudes Scniques et
Audiovisuelles (USJ, Beirut)
Institut National des Arts du
Spectacle et Techniques de
Diffusion (Brussels)
information technology
Journes Cinmatographiques de
Carthage (Tunis)
Jordanian Short Film Festival
(Amman)
Lebanese American University
(Beirut)
Middle East International Film
Festival (Abu Dhabi)
National Film School (now
National Film and Television
School) (Beaconsfield, UK)
Organisation Gnrale du
Cinma (General Organisation
for Cinema) (Syria)
Organisme Gnral du
Cinma et du Thtre (General
Organisation for Cinema and
Theatre) (Iraq)
Organisation of Petroleum
Exporting Countries
Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine
NB: The cole de Vaugirard is now the cole Nationale Suprieure Louis-Lumire.
Acronyms
xvi
PLO
RTBF
RTF
UAE
UAR
Palestine Liberation
Organisation
Radio Tlvision Belge
Francophone (Belgium)
Radio-Tlvision Franaise
(Paris)
United Arab Emirates
United Arab Republic (linking
Egypt and Syria, 19581961)
UCLA
University of California, Los

Angeles
UNESCO United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural
Organization
USJ
Universit Saint-Joseph (Beirut)
VGIK
Vsesoyuznyi Gosudarstvennyi
Institut Kinematografii (AllUnion State Cinema Institute)
(Moscow)
Arab Filmmakers
of the
Middle East
Introduction:
Filmmaking in
Divided Lands
Middle East is self-evidently a Western term,
and dates from the beginning of this century. It is
a striking testimony to the former power and continuing influence of the West that this parochial
term, meaningful only in a Western perspective,
has come to be used all over the world. It is even
used by the peoples of the region it denotes to
describe their own homelands. This is the more
remarkable in an age of national, communal, and
regional self-assertion, mostly in anti-Western
form.
Ber na r d Lew is, The Mu ltiple Identities of

the Middle East (1998: 3)
This dictionary is concerned with the films

directed by Arab filmmakers in and from
the Middle East. It excludes filmmakers from
the Maghreb and from Egypt (except for the
handful of Egyptian filmmakers who have
made the occasional film for Middle Eastern
producers), as these have already been dealt
with in an earlier volume, Dictionary of African Filmmakers.1 Thoughlike Israelmost
of the countries with which we are concerned
here achieved independence after the end of
World War II in the 1940s, their story has
nothing to match the tale of Zionist triumph,
which Ahmad H. Sadi characterizes as the
standard narrative of glorious rebirth, a story
of exile and return after millennia, with a people of memory and suffering redeemed by belonging to their own modern nation-state with
all its accoutrements: sovereignty, dignity, a
flag, an anthem, a mythical past, and future
prospects. A noble but embattled state.2 For
the dispossessed Palestinians, so neatly erased
from this grand narrative, the story of the past
60 years has been almost the exact reverse.
Even for those Arabs who do belong to a
recognized national state, the story has been
almost as bleak, with a unified Arab identity
denied by the divisive actions of the European
powers, which, after World War I, arbitrarily

set their borders and systems of government
and, without consultation, introduced Israel
into their midst. It is a story of internal feuding and repeated defeat and humiliation at the
hands of Israel and its all-powerful patrons.
The fragmented history of Arab Middle Eastern cinemawith its powerful documentary
componentreflects all too clearly the fragmented history of the Arab peoples and is indeed comprehensible only when this history is
taken into account. While neighboring countries, such as Turkey, Israel, and Iran, have coherent national film histories which have been
comprehensively documented, the Arab Middle East has been given comparatively little attention. Jacques Mandelbaum has gone so far
as to deny the very existence of cinema there,
arguing that if we were to keep to a classic
definition of cinema, essentially measurable
in terms of industrial weight, national production and aesthetic affirmation, we would
have to conclude that cinema no longer exists in the Middle East, in so far as it has ever
existed, outside Egypt.3 This all-too-common
dismissive attitude is one which this study is
designed to counteract.4
Arab Filmmakers of the Middle East
First Contact with the Cinema

The invention of the cinematograph by the Lumire Brothers in 1895 came at a time when
the world was organized very differently from
the way it is today. This was the height of imperial power for the European nations, which together colonized or controlled three-quarters
of the worlds population. It was three years
before the United States of America would
emerge in 1898 as a major imperialist power,
with overseas ambitions and interests, in the
Spanish-American War, which led to the annexation of the Philippines and the effective
colonization of Cuba. Indeed, for the first 10
15 years of the cinemas existence, there was
no Hollywood in the sense that we understand
it today: French films dominated the American market and so determined, in part, what
would become an American cinema.5
In 1895, most of what we now think of
as the Middle East formed part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which had its capital in
Istanbul, the ancient city of Constantinople.
Since the height of its powers at the end of the
eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire had
been in steady decline throughout the nineteenth century, first driven from its territories
in Christian Europe, then having its North
African provinces and, above all, Egyptsubmitted to European colonization or protection. But in the period up to the outbreak of
the First World War, the Turks still controlled
the area now occupied by the modern states
of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan,
and Israel-Palestine, an area in which, as Stewart Ross notes, the governments of the Great
Powers of Europe showed no special interest
and that of the United States even less.6
It was therefore to the palace in Istanbul
that the Lumire Brothers turned, when the
operator Alexandre Promio was dispatched on
his visit to Egypt and Turkey in MarchApril
1897, with instructions to follow the normal
company practice of organizing film shows
and also shooting material for inclusion in the
Lumire catalogue back in Paris (the Lumire
cinmatographe doubled as camera and projector). Screenings were set up in the palace
and at the residences of prominent citizens,
and a first public screening was arranged at

the Spontek Restaurant in a cosmopolitan district of Istanbul. Other Lumire operators also
visited Istanbul in the late 1890s, including Flix Mesguich, Francis Doublier, Charles Moisson, and Marius Perrigot. They all stopped
there during trips to Moscow, still ruled by the
tsar. The resulting shots taken in the Ottoman
Empire appeared in the Lumire catalogue
from 1897.
The Path representative in the Ottoman
Empire, a Polish Jew with Rumanian nationality, Sigmund Weinburg, was also apparently
active as early as 1897 and indeed had a more
lasting impact on the introduction of cinema to Turkey, by setting up the first permanent public cinema in 1908. He also initially
headed the army film unit, which pioneered
filmmaking in Turkey at the beginning of the
First World War, before being expelled as an
alien. Though the sultan, Abdul Hamid II,
was a passionate supporter of photography,
he disliked the cinema and offered no support to the foreigners who were seeking to introduce it into his realm. Promio is quoted as
saying:
I have little to say about my trip to Turkey, except that I had great difficulty in
introducing my camera. At the time,
in Abdul Hamids Turkey, any handcranked instrument was regarded with
suspicion; we had to get the French Embassy to intervene and then also slip a
few coins into an officials palm, just to
get free access.7
We do not know exactly where Promio went
during his trip through the Ottoman Empire,
but Jean-Claude Seguin suggests Damascus,
Jerusalem, and Bethlehem, as well as the cities
of Smyrna, Beirut, and Jaffa mentioned by Promio himself.8 Thus several of the future states
of the Middle East can trace their contact with
the cinemaif only momentarilyback to the
1890s. Seguin also notes that Promio set the
pattern for later European filmmakers visiting the East, in that his animated views are
inscribed in the Orientalist tradition strongly
rooted in painting and literature.9
Introduction
The End of Empire and the Era
of European Mandates
The weaknesses of the Ottoman Empirelike
those of its European parallel, the AustroHungarian Empirebecame apparent when
the two entered World War I on the side of
Germany. Defeat left Turkey at the mercy of
its wartime enemies, and the victorious European states, France and Britain, occupied
the whole Middle East and proceeded to impose their will upon the remains of the Empire. One of the many crucial European decisions and agreements regarding the Middle
East had already been made in 1917, with the
unilateral declaration of support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine by the British foreign secretary, Arthur
Balfour. This declaration led directly to the
establishment of Israel in 1948 and changed
the course of history in the Middle East forever. Chillingly, Balfour is quoted as saying
that,
In Palestine we do not propose even to
go through the form of consulting the
wishes of the present inhabitants of
the country . . . Zionism, be it right or
wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-old
traditions, in present needs, in future
hopes, of far profounder import than
the desires and prejudices of the 700,000
Arabs who now inhabit that ancient
land.10
Within the Ottoman Empire, a specific
Arab nationalism had been slow to develop.
Observing that the initial Arab antagonism
towards the Turks was more cultural than social or political, Peter Mansfield argues that
what was most resented was the Turkification of the educational system and the replacement of Arabic by Turkish for all except
religious studies. In practice, a large share of
political power passed into the hands of the
local elite of shaikhs, ulama and landowners.11 Anti-Turkish sentiment was muted too,
because the Arabs had traditionally seen their
governing co-religionists as a bulwark against
3
an increasingly expansionist Christian Europe.
In the early 1920s, when Turkey transformed itself in defeat from an empire and
caliphate into a modern secular nation-state
built on the European model, various proposals were put forward by Arab leaders for the
reshaping of their own lands. But emboldened
by the increasing retreat of the United States
into isolationism after the wartime interventionist idealism of Woodrow Wilson, the
French and British governments felt able to
ignore Arab wishes (just as Balfour had done
in 1917). The changes they made while their
troops occupied the Middle East met with far
greater opposition than Turkish rule had ever
faced. There were revolts against the French in
Syria in 1920, 1925, and 1926, a major uprising
against the British in Iraq in 1920, and continual fighting in Palestine, which stemmed
from Arab opposition to increasing Jewish
settlement. But French and English power
prevailed.
The American academic Justin McCarthy,
for whom the division of the Arab world by
the European conquerors was a disaster that
continues to our day,12 raises the intriguing
question of what might have been, if the obvious alternative to the Ottoman Empire in the
Middle East had been created, namely a single
Arab state. He argues incontrovertibly that a
state that included the Ottoman Arab provinces would have been less linguistically and
ethnically varied than the Ottoman Empire.
Could it have developed into a nation-state?
Yes, he argues: common language, history,
customs, and often a dominant religion are
the building blocks of nationalism. The Arabs
had all these.13 Certainly the new nation-state
of Indonesia, as Benedict Anderson points out,
was created in the 1940s out of far less promising material: enormous size, huge population (even in colonial times), geographical
fragmentation (about three thousand islands),
religious variegation (Muslims, Buddhists,
Catholics, assorted Protestants, Hindu-Balinese, and animists), and ethnolinguistic diversity (well over a hundred distinct groups).
Furthermore, as its hybrid pseudo-Hellenic
name suggests, its stretch does not remotely
correspond to any precolonial domain.14 Insofar as nationalism needs the stimulus of foreign aggression in order to grow, the British
and French provided this in abundance in the
Middle East, both during their military occupation and immediately after.
What a potential Arab nation lacked, because their rulers were Turks, not Europeans,
was a European-style colonial map, of the kind
which, in Indonesia, worked on the basis of a
totalizing classification (173) so as to prefigure the official nationalisms of Southeast Asia
(174). As Anderson points out, the apparently
innocent practice common to European imperial states of coloring their colonies on maps
(pink-red for British colonies, purple-blue for
French, yellow-brown for Dutch) had an unanticipated outcome: Dyed this way, each
colony appeared like a detachable piece of a
jigsaw puzzle (175). The image shifted from
being the map of an existing reality to becoming the sign of an imaginary unity: Instantly
recognisable, everywhere visible, the logomap penetrated deeply into the popular imagination, forming a powerful emblem for the
anticolonial nationalisms being born (175).
Apart from this lack of a map to define its
precise boundaries and differentiate it from its
neighbors, for many Arabs, the Arab nation
was a notion totally compatible with Benedict
Andersons definition of what constitutes a
unified nation: an imagined political communityand imagined as both inherently
limited and sovereign.15 The notion of a unified Arab nation even had some political currency. The followers of Hussein, the sharif of
Mecca, had proclaimed him King of the Arab
Countries in 1916, though this was highly
controversial. Britain had never formally recognized the title, but it had encouraged him
to believe that it would.16 William Polk points
to the useful Arabic distinction between this
notion of the Arab nation or pan-Arabism
(qawmiyah), which the Europeans opposed,
and the particularist nationalism17 of the
emergent states (wataniyah), whichon the
principle of divide-and-rulethey fostered.
McCarthy is unequivocal that uniting all of
what had been the Ottoman Arab world would
have been possible. What stood in the way of
an Arab state was not internal barriers. External forces kept the Arabs apart. From the
European point of view, the problem with a
unified Arab state, was that such a state would
have been large enough ... to have some power in the world.18 Certainly the establishment
of the state of Israel would have been far more
hazardous, if it had had to be imposed upon a
united Arab nation.
When the European colonialists took
over from the Turks, they proceeded as they
had done decades earlier with regard to Africa; they created theoretical states on maps,
regardless of economic and social realities,
then enforced their creation.19 But this time
they chose to hide their colonial ambitions by
using the institutions of the newly established
League of Nations to create mandates validating their actions. On this basis, the French and
the British took upon themselves not just the
definition and boundaries of the new states
but also the choice of their systems of government and the identity of the rulers who were
installed. What had been Greater Syria was
divided up to create three new states, Syria
and Lebanon under French mandates and Palestine under the British, who promptly subdivided their area to create a fourth state, TransJordan. Also under British mandate was the
newly created state of Iraq, put together from
three ethnically and religiously diverse Ottoman provinces, centered on Mosul, Baghdad,
and Basra, respectively. The mandates were
finalized by the mid-1920s, but though the
ostensible aim was for these new states to be
led toward independence, this occurred only
in the very changed circumstances of the late
1940s. No account was taken of Kurdish demands for their own independent state in the
north, while the new Middle Eastern arrangements totally ignored Saudi Arabia, out of
which Ibn Saud was to create a fully independent state by 1932, and the already independent North Yemen, presumably because both
were judged too difficult to colonize.
Given the upheavals of this pre-independence period, it is remarkable that any film
activity at all occurred. There seems indeed to
have been no film activity in Iraq until after
independence in 1945, but Syria and Leba-
Introduction
non both have pioneers to rank with Albert
Samama Chikly in Tunisia and the Egyptians
Mohamed Bayoumi and Mohamed Karim. In
Syria, Ayoub Badris first fictional film, The Innocent Victim (1928) achieved some success,
but his first feature, The Call of Duty (1937),
like Ismal Anzurs Under the Skies of Damascus (1931), was a commercial failure. Both were
silent features that found themselves in competition with the first Egyptian sound films. In
Lebanon, Jordano Pidutti achieved some success with two little comedies, The Adventures
of Elias Mabrouk (1929) and The Adventures of
Abou Abeid (1931), as did Julio De Luca and
Karam Boustany with a first Lebanese sound
film, In the Ruins of Baalbeck (1933). A further
Lebanese pioneer, Ali al-Ariss, was less fortunate. He had to leave his first feature, The Flower Seller (1943) unfinished, and he is reported
to have protested outside the cinema screening his second feature, The Planet of the Desert
Princess (1946), because it had been re-edited
by the producer.20 Palestine too has its pioneer
filmmaker, Ibrahim Hassan Sirhan, who was
virtually unknown until he was rediscovered
by the Iraqi filmmaker Qassim Hawal in the
Shatila refugee camp in the late 1970s. Sirhan
had apparently begun by documenting King
Sauds visit to to Palestine in 1935 and went
on to make a number of documentaries and
a couple of little-known features in Jordan, to
which he was driven into exile.21
Post-Independence
As Ghada Karmi makes clear, the very nature
of the Zionist project made war (or abject submission) inevitable for the Arabs. What the
Zionists envisaged was a project that was bizarre and, on the face of it, unworkable, namely to set up an ethnically defined, Jews-only
collective existing on a land belonging to another people and to their exclusion. Since this
new state was supposed, irrespective of native
opposition, to prosper in perpetuity, and the
5
original inhabitants were deemed ethnically
unacceptable, it could clearly only be realised by a mixture of force and coercion.22
The new Arab nation-states of the Middle East
emerged only in the mid-1940s: Iraq achieved
its independence in 1945, Syria and Lebanon
obtained theirs in 1946, the same year that the
Hashemite Kingdom of Trans-Jordan was created (to be renamed Jordan in 1948). Even before they could accustom themselves to their
new, artificial, boundaries and their imposed
systems of government, they were plunged
into war, when the state of Israel was formally
established in 1948.
It can be argued that this was a war of the
Arabs choosing and that they should therefore accept the consequences. But it is hard
to imagine how they could have reacted otherwise to a partition of Palestine, in which
they had not been consulted, and the expulsionlargely into their own territoriesof
some 750,000 Palestinians, in a process codenamed by the Israelis at the time as Plan D,
but which we now know as ethnic cleansing.
Whatever the rights or wrongs of the founding of Israel, for the Palestinians the year 1948
means only one thing: nakba, catastrophe.
The ill-prepared, disunited, and badly led
Arab troops were no match for an Israeli army
strengthened by the inclusion of the Hagana
and Irgun paramilitary forces. The eventual
truce in 1949 left Israel firmly established and
with its boundaries extended to take in another 20 percent of what the United Nations had
intended to be Palestinian territory.
The 19481949 Arab-Israeli war was just
the first of a seemingly endless series of international wars, invasions, conflicts, and expulsions to have plagued the Middle East over
the past 60 years. There were three further
general Arab-Israeli conflicts: the Suez invasion in 1956, the Six-Day War in 1967, and the
renewed Arab invasion (the Jom Kippur War),
which brought the Arabs some limited success, in 1973. Before this, in 1970, the events
of Black September had brought conflict
between Jordanians and Palestinians, and the
expulsion of the latter to Lebanon, where their
presence became one of the triggers for the 15year civil war which began in 1975. In 1981,
Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria and

bombed an alleged nuclear weapons plant in
Iraq. Israels first invasion of Lebanon (Operation Litani in 1978) was followed by a second
(Operation Peace for Galilee in 1981). This
led to a partial occupation of Lebanon which
lasted 9 years, and was followed by a third fullscale invasion, in 2007 (the 33 Day War). 2008
saw a massive Israeli invasion of Gaza.
From 1980 to 1988, Iraq was at war with
Iran, in a conflict that caused tremendous
losses to both sides. Palestinian militants responded to Israeli state aggression with a first
intifada in 1987, followed by a second, beginning in 2000 and still continuing 8 years later,
up to the Israeli assault on Gaza. Iraqs invasion of Kuwait in 1990 triggered the United
Statesled Desert Storm response of 1991,
which was followed by the Second Gulf War,
designed finally to overthrow Saddam Hussein, in 2003. These are merely the major international conflicts which created death and
destruction throughout the area. As we now
turn to the individual countries of the Arab
Middle East, we shall find that they were all
also plagued by internal conflictscoups, regional strife, and even, in the case of Lebanon,
full-scale civil warwhich inevitably shaped
and distorted both civil and cultural life, including the film production which concerns
us here.
Lebanon
Whereas the English imposed bedouin kings
on their mandated territories of Iraq and
Trans-Jordan, the French tried to establish
democratic republics in the areas they controlled. Nowhere was the constitution bequeathed on independence more finely tuned
and elaborately balanced than in Lebanon, a
wholly artificial state carved out of the old Syrian province, in which, at the time, just over
half the population was Christian (Maronites
and Catholics with traditional links to France,

as well as Protestants with ties to the United
States). The remainder of the population was
diverse: both Sunni and Shia Muslims, Druze,
Jews, and a number of tiny groups. The French
sought an intricate system of checks and balances: The post of president traditionally
went to a Maronite, that of prime minister to a
Sunni Muslim, with the speaker of the chamber of deputies being a Shia.23 Such a complex
system might have worked in a stable world,
but the Middle East, as we have seen, was a
world in constant turmoil. Discussing what
she terms the Hollow State, Sandra Mackey
argueswith some justificationthat the
Lebanon the French had created was little
more than a precariously balanced collective
of economically and politically linked autonomous societies living in a weak, schizophrenic
state.24
Though the French-imposed system actually fostered the sectarianism (the division between Maronite, Shia, and Sunni) that would
eventually tear the country apart, it seemed at
first to offer positive advantages. Christiandominated Lebanon adopted a pro-Western
stance and tried to stand aside from the basic
quarrels between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East (it took no part in the wars of 1967
and 1973). The recipe seemed to work and
Lebanon prospered, so that, by the mid-1960s,
Beirut had morphed into a glitzy, Mediterranean metropolis, a Mecca for the international
set, a haven for exiles of the regions political
wars, and a brothel of business, where cash
transcended law and ethics.25 Moreover, if
Beirut had pulsated in the 1960s, it vibrated in
the early 1970s, as the 1973 oil boom in the
Gulf took effect.26
It is against this background that the
early development of post-independence cinema in Lebanonso different from that elsewhere in the Middle Eastmust be assessed.
The beginnings in the 1950s were hesitant:
Michel Haroun, a recruit from the theatre,
made just one feature, Georges Kahi directed
his first film in literary Arabic before turning
to Lebanese dialect for his subsequent works,
while Georges Nasser, having presented his
Introduction
feature debut at Cannes, shot his second film
in French, in the vain hope of attracting an
up-market audience at home. Hady Zaccak
observes that these early filmmakers drew
their subjects from Lebanese reality, putting
the emphasis on the beauty of the landscape,
village life, Lebanese dress and popular musical traditions as well.27 But the pioneer director who found the path to popular success and
established commercial filmmaking in Lebanon was Mohamed Selmane, who had trained
in Egypt and subsequently adapted Egyptian
popular film styles in a highly successful career that embraced thirty feature films shot
over a period of 25 years.
The development of commercial filmmaking in Lebanon during the 1960s and
early 1970s was aided by the disruption caused
by the nationalization of film production in
Egypt, with the setting up of the General Organisation for Cinema (19631971)though
the Egyptian studios still managed to produce 720 features in the period 19601975.
For their part, Lebanese producers made 105
features in the same period, new cinemas
sprang up in Beirut and elsewhere, and audience numbers soared. The major commercial
directors, whose careers all extended into the
1980sMohamed Selmane and Rida Myassar, followed in the early 1970s by Samir alGhoussayniall produced a spate of films.
Co-productions with Egypt and Syria were
undertaken and this was, in one sense, the
golden age of Lebanese cinema.
But, as Zaccak notes, the growth in production was merely in quantity, not in quality.
Many of the films were based on Egyptian or
Western commercial formulas, with no specific Lebanese identity (even the dialogue of
many films was in Egyptian dialect), and the
key development requiredthe creation of
the infrastructure needed for a film industry
to rival Egyptcould not be achieved. There
were a number of cultural initiativesthe Beirut Cin Club was founded in 1957, the first
International Film Festival to be held in the
Arab world took place in 1971, the Arab Film
and Television Centre was established thanks
to Unesco initiatives in 1962, followed by the
The Broken Wings (1962, Lebanon)

Youssef Maalouf had worked in the Egyptian feature-film industry for 10 years
when, in 1962, he arrived in Lebanon to
direct the first of the ten films he was to
make there, and in Syria, in the course of
the next decade. The Broken Wings is virtually the only readily available film from
the era when Beirut set out to rival Cairo
as the center of Arab film. The English subtitled version of The Broken Wings does
not contain full credits and attributes the
script to Khalil Gibran, the celebrated author of The Prophet. But since the writer
died in 1931, it seems inevitable that the
script, though based on his autobiography, was in fact adapted by a professional
screenwriter. Whatever the case, the film
captures the full flavor of Gibrans floridly
lyrical style through its static declamatory dialogue, full of aphorisms and lofty
sentiments, and through the overlaying
of Rachmaninoffs Second Piano Concerto at emotional high points throughout.
Maalouf directs the studio set movie with
fluid assurance and has made a thoroughly
professional job of reshaping the material
into the conventional form of an Egyptian film melodrama, even finding space
for a lengthy belly-dancing scene (one of
the rare moments of oriental music in the
film). The story, with occasional first person voice-over comments by the author,
tells of Gibrans first great love, for the
beautiful Selma, in the context of turn-ofthe century Christian Lebanon. The lovers,
who fall in love at first sight, are separated
when her wealthy father is persuaded by
the bishop to marry her off to the bishops
nephew, who is a gambler, drunkard, and
womanizer. The broken wings of the title
are those of women in an unenlightened
patriarchal society, against which Gibran
rails in vain. Selma is idealized as a passive
victim of oriental despotism whose predicable fate, death in childbirth, forms the
films emotional climax.
8
West Beyrouth (1998, Lebanon)
Ziad Doueiri, who was 12 when the Lebanese

Civil War broke out in Beirut and lived there for
a further 8 years, returned after 15 years in the
United States to recreate his childhood years
in West Beyrouth. During his years of absence,
he had studied film at UCLA and worked in
Hollywood, most notably as camera assistant
to Quentin Tarantino. These experiences find
their direct reflection in the film, which follows closely the experiences of the exuberant
and rebellious middle-class schoolboy Tarek,
his close friend Omar, and a Christian refugee,
May, as they live through their adolescent experiences and obsessions at the very moment
the war breaks out. The film captures brilliantly the initial uncertainties of the time, for
adults and children, as events unfold around
them without logic or meaning. Tareks own
personal rebellion at his French-language
school, with which the film opens, is soon
drowned by the chaos in the streets of what
is now marked off by the fighting as West
Beirut. Perhaps because he has chosen to
tell his film through the eyes of adolescents
totally lacking political or religious insights
Centre National du Cinma (CNC), attached

to the Ministry of Information, in 1964.28 But
key newcomers of the 1960s tended to come
not from these developments but from television.
The incident which plunged Lebanon into
sudden and unexpected civil war in 1975 was
no more than a trivial fishing dispute, but it
brought to the fore a number of key underlying issues. The major problem was the threat
to Maronite supremacy caused by demographic changes (which saw the nine hundred thousand Maronites outnumbered in a
population of some three and a half million)
and the arrival of a new wave of Palestinian
immigrants (after the events of Black September had caused the Palestine Liberation
Organisations [PLOs] expulsion from Jordan)
who organized themselves as a state within a
and has included presumably autobiographical elements (such as the boys obsession with
Super 8 filming), Doueiri adopts an upbeat
and positive attitude toward the horrors perpetrated in the city. Significantly, no one close
to Tarek is either killed or wounded, and his
parents, though left destitute and confused,
are unbroken by events. Doueiri films with
an often handheld camera and uses a jagged
editing style to create closeness to the characters. He captures the exuberant flow of events
and skilfully uses music to blend his enacted
story with real documentary and newsreel archive footage. No side is blamed and no political points are made. Instead, Doueiri seeks
out absurd and comic touches, such as the
adoption by fighters on all sides of a womans
brassiere as the emblem or flag to indicate to
each other that they are visiting the neutral
space of the brothel, not engaged in hostile
acts and therefore not to be shot by snipers.
West Beyrouth was clearly conceived as entertainment which would also offer insights into
the unique reality of the Lebanese Civil War
years. In this, Doueiri is totally successful.
state in Lebanon, as they had done in Jordan.

Once violence began, the government had neither the authority nor the military resources
to restore order, so that soon the various
armed militias were at war, each defending
its own territorial areas and what it saw as its
own specific interests: The Druze and some
Lebanese leftists fought for power in the Lebanese system. Other Lebanese Muslims fought
for radical reform and a Lebanon stripped of
its Western identity. The Palestinians fought
for their own nationalism. Some Christians
fought for political reform and Arab identity.
The Maronites fought for their vision of Christian Lebanon.29 The Israelis, the Americans,
and the Syrians all intervened militarily in the
civil war, while both Iran and Iraq provided
financial assistance to combatants. There is
much truth in the traditional Arab joke quot-
Introduction
Under the Bombs (2007, Lebanon)

Philippe Aractingi has 20 years of experience
in documentary filmmaking from a production
base in France and has recently developed an
interest in improvisation. These two concerns
were brought together in 2006, in the last
days of the Israeli 33 Day invasion of Lebanon
and during the ensuing uneasy truce. With
two professional actors, Aractingi set out
to make a road movie, tracing two peoples
journey from Beirut to the South, through the
shattered landscape of Lebanon immediately
after the Israeli assault. The two protagonists
are contrasting figures. Zeina is a rich Lebanese Shiite expatriate, returning from Dubai
to search for her son, Karim, lost with her sister in the bombing of their native village of
Kherbet Selm. Tony is a working-class Christian taxi driver, also from the South, initially
concerned primarily with being well paid for
risking his life on a trip refused by all his colleagues. The film sensitively traces the growing relationship between the two, powered by
Tonys obvious sexual attraction for his passenger. Under the tension of the journey, they
move from initial hostility to emotional close-
ed by Ross: God laughed when He created the

Sudan and wasnt thinking when He created
Arabia; so what were You doing, asked the bemused Lebanese, when You created our beautiful land of cedar trees, blue seas and cool
breezes? Ah, God smiled, just wait until you
see who Ive given you as neighbours.30
Funded through extortion, the plundering of the states resources, and foreign assistance, the militias were initially rich. As
a result, ever more powerful and destructive
weapon systems were introduced into the civil
conflict, and the savagery of the combatants
rose steadily. The Lebanese civil war lasted fifteen years in all, and finally came to an end
only when the state had been bankrupted,
the economy ruined, and vast swathes of the
country, and especially Beirut, had been totally devastated. Little beyond destruction
ness, gradually revealing their personal lives

to each other. Eventually, it is Tony who drives
the search forward, only for the child eventually found to turn out to be not Karim but his
traumatized friend, whose family was slaughtered in the same assault which killed Zeinas
sister. More important than this central dramatic core is the series of glimpses the film
offers of the impact of the Israeli onslaught
on ordinary Lebanese civilians. The couples
journey takes them through a landscape of
horror, where whole communities have been
devastated. Apart from the central couple and
the hotel receptionist with whom Tony has a
brief sexual fling, all the characters are people
directly living the disaster. The images of human suffering are particularly harrowing,
because these are real victims, filmed at the
very moment when they are having to come
to terms with the loss of their families. This
human immediacy has a devasting impact on
the viewer: as Philippe Aractingi has said, the
experience of Under the Bombs was less that
of making a film than that of living the film.
had been achieved. Perhaps one hundred fifty

thousand people had been killed and 15 percent of the population driven into exile. A war
which was anchored in no coherent set of
ideas ended, 15 years later, with no resolution of the issues that had ignited it. The Lebanese civil war had, in short, been destructive and futile, ugly and unfinished. It ended
only because the Lebanese became numb to
each other.31
The civil war inevitably brought the collapse of existing Lebanese commercial filmmaking structures, as studios and cinemas
were destroyed and filmmakers scattered. But
under the pressure of events, a new generation
of filmmakers emerged, whom Zaccak terms
the filmmakers of the Lebanese intelligentsia, their arrival heralded by Maroun Bagdadis premonitory feature, Beirut Oh Beirut
10
(1975). Like Bagdadi, who studied filmmaking in Paris, all the new group had studied in
Europe: Jean Chamoun, Jocelyne Saab, and
Randa Chahal-Sabbag in Paris, and Borhan
Alawiya in Brussels. Only Saab, who had
studied economics at the Sorbonne, was not
a professionally trained filmmaker. Many of
their films were made with foreign finance
often from European television sources. But
even when living in exile, their commitment
to their country and its predicament, matched
with a deep concern for the Palestinian cause,
is very clear from the documentaries they
made during the civil war period. This group
is the one which dominates much of what we
think of as Lebanese filmmaking.
The terms of the ceasefire which brought
fighting to an end in 1990 did nothing to cure
the inherent structural weaknesses of the
Lebanese state. Huge efforts at reconstruction
were made, particularly under the impetus of
the Sunni billionaire businessman and sometime prime minister Rafik Hariri. But by the
time Hariri was assassinated in 2005, many
of the problems which had plagued Lebanon
in the late 1970s had returned. The Iranianbacked Hezbollah grew to a position where it
could taunt the Israelis and provide the trigger for a renewed Israeli invasion of southern Iraq in 2007, which killed thousands of
innocent Lebanese in an all-out land and air
bombardment which lasted 33 days. But Hezbollah emerged undefeated (if not victorious)
from the conflictthe first time an Arab force
had stood up to the full might of the Israeli
war machineand, like the PLO before it, set
out to create a state within a state (perhaps
more aptly named a state within a no-state)
in Lebanon. But this time the threat was even
more daunting: the destruction of the Lebanese secular Western-style democracy and
its replacement with a theocracy based on the
Iranian model.
During the time of transition and unease after the end of the civil war, many of the
documentarists of the 1970s turned to feature
filmmaking. Their efforts have been supported by a diverse range of, mostly younger, feature filmmakers. Layla Assaf, who trained in
Sweden, made numerous documentaries for
Swedish television before completing her first

feature in Lebanon. But many of the newcomers have no background at all in documentary filmmaking: Samir Habchi, who studied
in Russia, Jean-Claude Codsi, a graduate of
the Institut National des Arts du Spectacle et
Techniques de Diffusion (INSAS) in Belgium,
Josef Fars, who has lived since a child in Sweden, and Ziad Doueiri, who was brought up
and educated in the United States. Equally
striking is the work of those new filmmakers based in FranceDanielle Arbid, Michel
Kammoun, and Philippe Aractingialong
with that of the actress Nadine Labaki, who is
based in Lebanon but wrote her first feature,
Caramel (2007), in Cannes. Much of the work
of these filmmakers is couched as entertainment and unashamedly seeks an international
audience, even if, as Lina Khatib concludes,
the Civil War has become the defining feature of Lebanese cinema.32
Syria
Though the constitution bequeathed to Lebanon by the French caused (and continues to
cause) huge problems, there was no internal
dispute about the boundaries of the new state.
The dominant Maronites were happy to accept
the notion of a Greater Lebanon (le Grand
Liban), since it added the coastal towns of
Tripoli, Sidon, and Tyre to their traditional
autonomous heartland of Mount Lebanon.
In contrast, the Syrians did not accept the restricted territory bequeathed to them in the
French partition of the ill-defined Arab state.
In part, this may be attributed to the fact that,
in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the
Ottoman Empire and before the formalization of the mandate, there was briefly an independent Greater Syria, which held elections
for a National Syrian Congress in May 1919,
formed a national government in Damascus
in December that year, and, in March 1920,
chose, as its king, the amir Feisal, third son
Introduction
11
The Extras (1993, Syria)

Nabil al-Maleh is a pioneer of Syrian cinema
who contributed one episode to the first collective film produced by the state film corporation and directed its first full-length feature,
The Leopard (1972). But like virtually all Syrian directors, he has had trouble with the film
authorities and the censor, and he returned
from years in exile to direct his fifth, and to
date final, feature, The Extras, in 1993. After a
fairly frenetic credit sequence, which edits together key images from throughout the film,
The Extras is a virtually real-time study of 2
hours spent together in a friends flat by two
young people, shot through only by brief images of the mans imaginings of his own force
and prowess. Though they have known each
other for 8 months, this is the couples first
time alone together (there is a marvellous moment when she removes her headscarf and he
sees her luxuriant black hair for the first time).
The film as a whole is a masterly depiction of
their awkwardness and insecurity, the result
of living in a society which allows them no
personal freedom. Their very different temp-
of Sharif Hussein of Mecca and leader of the

bedouin revolt against the Ottomans.33 But,
within months, the European provisions of
the Treaty of San Remo were imposed (against
fierce and continuing Arab opposition), and
the Arab world was divided into the mandated
territories which now form the independent
states of the Arab Middle East. Feisal was
promptly expelled by the French, but, in compensation, was made king of the newly created
mandated territory of Iraq by the British.
When Syria became independent in 1946,
it continued to have problems with its national
identity. Though lacking in the manpower and
national resources to achieve its ambitions, it
became a major proponent of war against Israel and of pan-Arab unity. In 1958, it even
merged with Nassers Egypt (with which it has
no land borders) to form the United Arab Republic, but this union dissolved in acrimony 3
eraments are gradually revealed, both to each

other and to us. Nada, a widow who lives with
her domineering brother, is the more mature,
and, in their longest embrace, Salem falls asleep like a child in her arms. Salem, a wouldbe actor at the National Theatre who earns
his living by working in a petrol station, is
more dynamic, acting out an elaborate marriage proposal and staging play excerpts for
her. But to her consternation, he can play only
bit parts, doomed and ignoble figures. From
early on in the narrative, the interior of the flat
has been under threat from sinister and powerful state policemen lurking outside to catch
and persecute the blind oud player who lives
next door. Their intrusion leads to Salems humiliation, which Nada observes. Though she
pretends all is well, there seems little hope for
their relationship, as they go their own ways
at the end of the film. Combining precise observation, sensitive acting, and a perceptive
use of sound, The Extras is a powerful study
of the impact on ordinary people of a harsh
and repressive regime.
and a half years later. Syria has continued to

seek to influence developments in neighboring countries, stationing troops in Lebanon
for 29 years and acting as a major sponsor of
the insurgents in occupied Iraq, prompting
Fouad Ajamis remark that Syrias main asset,
in contrast to Egypts preeminence and Saudi
wealth, is its capacity for mischief.34 Internally Syria was in complete disarray for the first
25 years of its existence, since, as Barry Rubin
notes, it had twenty different cabinets and
four different constitutions in the first decade
of existence (19461956) and it suffered ten
successful coups and a lot of failed ones in the
period up to 1970.35
Unsurprisingly, there is little film production in Syria before 1970: one feature in
the 1940s, two in the 1950s, and just five in
the 1960s. Syrian cinema of the time was best
known for the comedies starring Dureid Lah-
12
The Night (1992, Syria)
Mohamed Malass second feature film, The

Night, is the first part of a projected trilogy,
of which his first feature, City Dreams (1984),
forms the second stage. The third part, Cinema al-Dunya, has not been realized. The Night
covers the events of a decade or more of Syrian history (19361948) and reflects the tortured politics of these years. It also relates the
lives and dreams of its two central characters,
a mother, Wissal, and her only son, who both
figure as voice-over narrators for some of the
films episodes. Beyond this, the dominant figure in the whole is the often absent father,
Alalla, whose life is closely enmeshed with the
events of the times, particularly those involving Palestine. The film is also markedly autobiographical, set in Koneitra, the directors own
birthplace and a town occupied by the Israelis since they seized the Golan Heights in the
1967 war. The literary nature of the narration
reflects Malass own ambitions as a writer:
he has revealed that he turned to cinema because the only scholarships for study abroad
ham and Nouhad Kalahi, who had begun their

joint career on Syrian television, but whose
feature films were largely co-productions directed either by the Lebanon-based Egyptian
Youssef Maalouf or by Lebanese directors. In
1963, power was seized by the Baath Party (the
name means renaissance or awakening),
which has been characterized by William Polk
as authoritarian, somewhat mystical, vaguely
socialistic but determinedly pan-Arabist.36
The change did not bring stability to Syria, but
it did lead to a major development in Syrian
cinema, namely the founding that year of the
General Establishment for Cinema (referred to
by French critics as the Organisation Nationale
du Cinma), set up on the Egyptian model, to
oversee film production, distribution, import,
and export. The organizations first feature
production was The Lorry Driver (1966), directed by the Yugoslav filmmaker appointed
to oversee its activities, variously referred to
in 1968 were for the Soviet film school, the

VGIK, in Moscow. The Night opens with Wissal and her son looking up at the night sky,
and the narrative begins with her memories
and dreams of her dead husband. They met
when he passed through Kuneitra in 1936, on
his way to fight the British and the Jews in
Palestine, and he married her, at her fathers
request, on his return as a broken man from
the fighting. Alallas life is a turbulent one.
Though he lives in Kuneitra, he is always a
transient figure, and he is twice imprisoned
by the authorities. His son, also called Alalla,
struggles to come to terms with his fathers
life, and the latter part of the film becomes
his story and his memories, real or imaginary.
Visually, the film is very formally composed,
and the narrative, full of echoes and repetitions, operates on a number of levels simultaneously. As a whole, The Night is a complex
interweaving of intense personal experiences
within the family and startling political transitions in the street outside.
by Yves Thoraval as Boshko Votchinitch, by

Mahmud Abdel Wahed as Bosko Vucinitch,
and by Rasha Salti as Poko Pokovic. In 1969,
the General Establishment was granted a monopoly of film production and the following
year released Men Under the Sun, a three-part
feature directed by three Syrian newcomers,
Nabil al-Maleh, Mohamed Shahin, and Mohamed Muwaddin.
When Hafiz al-Assad took control of Syria in a coup by the radical wing of the Baath
Party in 1970, he imposed absolute authority
on Syrian internal affairs, while continuing
Syrias now traditionally aggressive foreign
policy and maintaining close ties with the Soviet Union (the source of government weaponry). Constant features of his 30-year reign were
the advocacy of pan-Arabism of one form or
another and the ongoing domination of Lebanon, by means of threats, secret service operations, the funding of terrorist activities and
Introduction
13
The Nights of the Jackal (1989, Syria)

Abdellatif Abdelhamid is by far the most prolific of Syrias internationally known directors,
with eight features in 20 years. His films are
immediately accessible, and he is one of the
most popular directors with Syrian audiences.
The pattern was set with his first feature, The
Nights of the Jackal, which is a basically realistic tragi-comedy, set in 1967 in the arid
countryside near the port of Lattakia, where
the director was born. But the film also has
a touch of pure fantasy. At night, the farm is
surrounded by jackals, whose howling cannot be silenced except by high-pitched whistling, which only the heros wife, Um Kamel,
can manage. Kamel himself cannot whistle,
though his wife makes it clear that she regards this as a mans responsibility. By day,
Kamels apparent authority is restored, as he
leads his family out to the fields, pompously
riding a donkey. But the daytime world too
is full of unseen dangers, and gradually the
basis of Kamels authority is destroyed, as he
loses the members of his family, one by one.
His older daughter gets married, but the sec-
actual military occupation. Al-Assad came

from the minority Alawite sect in Syria. As
outsiders to the dominant Sunni Muslim community, the Alawites had been recruited into
the armed forces by the French during their
years of rule. Al-Assad rose steadily through
the ranks from squadron leader to head of the
air force and he had, by the time of the coup,
become minister of defence.
Al-Assads dictatorial rule gave Syria a
hitherto unknown national stability, but this
has only been achieved at the cost of brutal
repression (with particular ferocity directed
against the Muslim Brotherhood), massive
state control and heavy censorship; his approach has been characterized as one part realism, one part ideology, and one part familybased mafia.37 A basic component of his rule
has been the Baath Party, in power when he
took control. The party took as its organiza-
ond one gets pregnant, elopes, and is later

slaughtered in an honor killing. His westernized elder son abandons his university studies,
while the reliable second son is conscripted
and killed, resulting in the death of Um Kamel
too. When Kamel grows tomatoes, they fall in
price in the state-controlled market; when he
volunteers for military service, he is promptly
dismissed. His one recognized skill is repairing radios. He carries his own with him at all
times, enjoying the stirring music and believing the patriotic propaganda. But toward the
end of the film, the radio also lets him down,
bringing only news of the Arabs humiliating
defeat at the hands of the Israelis. When his
final child, his youngest son, Bassam, leaves
him, Kamel is totally alone. He had tried buying a whistle on a trip to Lattakia, but the
jackals were not deceived. Now, still unable
to whistle, he succumbs to the night and the
jackals. Beneath the surface farce, The Nights
of the Jackal has a serious message about
the place of the traditional Arab male, and of
Syria, in the modern world.
tional model the Soviet Communist Party, in

which the key is to control all the commanding heights of the society: army, economy, media, education, religion, and so on, both to use
them for promoting the regime and to keep
them out of anyone elses hands.38 In this,
al-Assad succeeded totally, and the result is a
society marked by authoritarian control and
massive state propaganda, arbitrary imprisonment, and torture, which is, at the same time,
a society in which the people generally accept
the regimes stories.39 It was hoped that when
his son Bashar succeeded Hafez al-Assad as
president after his death in 2000, there would
be some softening of the regimes stance and
some recognition of past errors (as has occurred in Morocco since Mohammed VI succeeded his father, the autocratic King Hassan
II, who ruled from 1962 to 1999). But this was
not to be, with Bashar telling a journalist in
14
2001: The development of civil society institutions must come at a later stage. And they
are not therefore among our priorities.40
The cinema which emerged under alAssads rule is, as Rasha Salti notes, highly
paradoxical: while not an industry, it performs
the role of a national repository of aspirations
and sentiments; though a state-sponsored
cinema, it is also the premier realm of artistic
expression in contemporary cinema, offering
a lucid, intelligent and subversive critique of
the state.41 The filmmaker Hala al-Abdallah
Yakoub offers a striking characterization of
the two contradictory realms of Syrian cinema: an open realm, charged with courage
and freedom, creativity and imagination, defiance and provocation and a closed realm,
encumbered with fear and ambivalence, echo
and emptiness, confinement and absence.42
The pioneering Nabil al-Maleh, who trained at
Filmov Akademie Mzickych Umen (FAMU)
in Czechoslovakia, was one of the first to experience the states displeasure, when his second
feature led to him being banned from working
for the state organization for 5 years. For the
past two decades he has lived in exile, though
returning to Syria to direct the masterly study
of the impact on personal relations of a totally
repressive society, The Extras (1993).
Throughout the years of Hafez al-Assads
rule, the General Establishment for Cinema
maintained an approach committed to the regimes causes (such as Palestine and pan-Arab
unity) and favored the adaptation of major
works of contemporary Syrian literature (such
as the novels and stories of Ghassan Kanafani and Hanna Mina). It imported directors
from other Arab countries in the early years:
the Egyptians Tewfiq Saleh and Seif-Eddine
Chawkat, the Iraqis Qays al-Zubaydi and Qassim Hawal, and the Lebanese Borhan Alawiya
all worked there between 1969 and 1974. But
it also trained two generations of Syrian filmmakers by offering bursaries for study in the
Soviet Union (at film schools in Kiev or Moscow). This shared training has given rise to a
distinctive Syrian approach, while still enabling the leading filmmakers to have highly
individual personal styles. Though itself a

tightly controlled state institution, the General Establishment has offered its filmmakers
considerable freedom in the films they made,
even if these works have been subsequently
banned or denied screenings in Syria by the
state censors.
Attention in the West was initially captured by two filmmakers who made their
feature film debuts in the early 1980s, Samir
Zikra with The Half-Metre Incident (1983) and
Mohamed Malas with City Dreams (1984), followed 8 years later by The Night (1992). They
were joined later in the decade by Oussama
Mohammad, whose debut film, Stars in Broad
Daylight, appeared in 1988. But though they
form a closely knit trio, collaborating on each
others works, they have made only three or
four features features apiece in 30 years, often
with gaps of 10 years or more between productions. Omar Amiralay, the sole documentarist
in the group, who trained in France, has chosen to live in exile there since the early 1980s,
after his first feature-length work, Everyday
Life in a Syrian Village (1974), was banned.
Among Syrian directors of the 1980s, only
Abdellatif Abdelhamid has managed to direct
a succession of eight features, from The Nights
of the Jackal (1989) to Days of Boredom (2008).
There have since been further striking debuts
by directors trained in Moscow in the 1990s
and 2000s, but neither Riyad Shayya (Al-Lajat,
1995) nor Nidal al-Dibs (Under the Ceiling,
2005) has been able to complete a second feature. In the last decade, thanks to the growth
of Syrian television and the advent of digital
technology, new possiblities of production
outside the General Establishment for Cinema
have arisen. A number of Syrian newcomers, most still in their twenties and thirties
and many based abroad, are active, making
short fictional and documentary works, with
the path to feature-length output pioneered
by the Paris-based Hala al-Abdallah Yakoub
with her experimental video autobiography, I
Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her Grave
(2006).
Introduction
Iraq
The cinemas of Syria and Iraq, like the political development of the two countries and
the careers of their respective long-serving
dictators, offer fascinating parallels and stark
contrasts. While Syrias initial problem was
that of coming to terms with its constrained
boundaries, Iraq had to fuse three Ottoman
provinces (vilayets), centered respectively on
Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra, that had not previously formed a single unit and to attempt to
unite three very diverse communities (Sunni,
Shia, and Kurd). The years of the mandate
were years of continual Arab revolt, and, like
Syria, Iraq took years to find a national identity. In the 1920s and 1930s, the British treated
Iraq much as they treated Egypt, offering its
pro-Western monarch notional independence,
while ensuring that what they most wanted
would be kept safelines of transportation,
British oil companies, and military control.43
The British, like the French, did not plan to
advise and assist, but to rule.44 As Gertrude
Bell, who was intimately involved in the creation of Iraq, wrote in 1920, The underlying
truth of all criticismand its what makes the
critics so difficult to answer[was] that we
had promised self-governing institutions, and
not only made no step towards them, but were
busily setting up something quite different.45
The British authority extended into the early
1940s, when, after a nationalist coup, they reinstated the royal family of Feisal II (who had
become king in 1939) and restored the authority of the pro-Western prime minister Nuri alSaid. Iraq became fully independent in 1945 as
a monarchy, and this situation lasted, despite
nationalist unrest, until 1958, when a military
coup by the so-called Free Officers abolished
the monarchy and executed both the royal
family and the prime minister.
There seems to have been no filmmaking
in Iraq before independence in 1945, and the
late 1940s features which did emerge were shot
either as co-productions by experienced Egyptian directors or by a Frenchman (identified
by Yves Thoraval as Andr Chotin),46 who was
invited to shoot the first feature at the newly
15
opened Baghdad studios. The first feature to
claim Iraqi identity is Abdl Khaliq al-Samaris
Regrets (1955). There was no support for filmmaking from the royal government, and only
fourteen features were made in 19451959,
with Hyder al-Omer being the sole director
to complete two features. The two films which
critics pick out from the period are Abdl Jabar
Walis Who Is Responsible? (1956) and Kameran Hassanis Sad Effendi (1957).
The 1958 coup did not produce a stable
Iraq. There were regular assassination attempts
on whoever assumed power, and further coups
in 1963, which brought the Baath Party to
power for the first time, and in 1968, which reestablished its rule. Brigadier Qasim was succeeded by Colonel Abdus-Salam Arif, who was
killed in an air crash and followed as president
by his brother, Abdur-Rahman Arif, who was
overthrown in a Baath Party coup, led by General Hassan al-Bakr. Successive governments,
all dominated by Sunni officers, were thrown
off course by external eventsthe 1967 ArabIsraeli war, the relationship with Egypt, panArabism or the oil crisisbut it was internal
problems, first with the Kurds and then with
the Shia majority, which brought Saddam
Hussein, for 11 years al-Bakrs seemingly loyal
deputy, to power in 1979. His response to personal authority was the immediate execution
of all possible rivals and a purge of opposition
supporters throughout the country.
As in Syria, it was a change of government
through military action which precipitated the
establishment of a state media organization in
1959. But the title of this, the General Organisation for Cinema and Theatre, points to the
lack of autonomy of filmmaking in Iraq at this
time. As in Algeria, the state organizations focus kept shifting: in 1972 it was fused with the
Radio and Television Organisation and then,
in 1975, split off again. In its early years it was
principally a documentary producer (three
hundred documentaries had been made by
1970),47 and its first three feature films were
not released until 19691970. State production
after 1972 began with the first important production of Mohamed Choukri Jamil, who, like
his colleague Fayal al-Yassiri, worked mainly
16
Clash of Loyalties (1983, Iraq)
Mohamed Choukri Jamil began his career as a

documentary filmmaker for British oil companies and received his training as a filmmaker
in England. His early feature films of the
1970s include two adaptations of Iraqi novels, The Thirsty Ones (1972), dealing with the
plight of the peasantry in a time of drought,
and The Walls (1979), which explores the
urban struggle against the monarchy in the
early 1950s. His most ambitious film, Clash
of Loyalties, is a big-budget international coproduction, made from an original script and
in two versions (Arabic and English), with a
huge budget provided by the Iraqi government. The handling of the spectacular battle
scenes is impressive. Clash of Loyalties deals
with the Iraqi revolt in 1920 against the imposition of the British mandate in Iraq. But
rather than exploring the complex national
and political tensions that exist in relation
to this crucial historical moment, Jamil opted
for an epic treatment in the manner of David
Lean, drawing heavily on the camerawork of
for the public sector in the following years.

From 1959, the private sector continued to
operate alongside the state organization, producing almost three times more features than
the ten produced by the General Organisation
before 1977, when a virtual state monopoly
was introduced. Nineteen eighty and eightyone were key years for the state organization,
with films produced by two major Egyptian
filmmakers, The Long Days by Tewfiq Saleh
and The Battle of Al-Qdissiya by Salah Abou
Seif, as well as the founding of the state film
production company, Babylon/Babil.
For the new Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, 1980 was the year he began the Iran-Iraq
war, invading a country over three times the
size of Iraq in an assault which Saddam expected to last a month and lead to the overthrow of the Khomeini regime, but which
instead dragged on for 95 months.48 The war,
one of the most costly, cruel and protracted
English director of photography Jack Hilyard

and on Ron Goodwins very Western musical
score. One Iraqi critic has maintained that the
leader of the revolt is depicted like the hero
of a Hollywood Western and complained of
the falsification of the role of King Faisal
seen here as a leader of the nationalist revolt,
rather than as the compliant would-be ruler
to be imposed by the British. While the mass
of the Arab people is reduced to mere extras
dying spectacularly in desert battles, most of
the films focus is on the highly personalized
internal clash among the British, with Oliver
Reed dominating the strong English acting
participation in the film. Despite this concentration on the British occupiers, many of the
key historical figures who shaped the fate of
Iraq, such as Sir Arnold Wilson, are omitted,
and the crucial role of Gertrude Bell is downplayed. For all its impressive spectacle, Clash
of Loyalties offers only limited insight into the
historical realities of 1920.
of modern wars,49 resulted in huge suffering

for both nations, who fought with the utmost
determination and ruthlessness. As a result,
there were atrocities on both sides, especially
Saddam Husseins use of poison gas attacks,
a tactic which he later applied to dissident
populations within Iraq. Half-a-million people died, but in the end, the war was a draw.
Neither country lost much territory, nor was
there any change of regime in either nation.
The conflict enabled Khomeini to consolidate
the Islamic revolution. And Iraq emerged as
the most powerful military force in the region,
outstripping Turkey and Egypt.50
With the state now bankrupt and with his
army as his sole (if expensive) asset, Hussein
decided on a new war. He had been supported
by the West throughout the Iran-Iraq conflict
and received very ambiguous responses to his
new plans. So, on August 2, 1990, he launched
his attack on neighboring Kuwait. This attack
Introduction
17
Dreams (2005, Iraq)

Mohamed al-Daradjis experiences while
making Dreams, recounted in his documentary War, Love, God and Madness, show the difficulties in filming in Iraq after 2003. As well
as facing logistical and casting problems, alDaradji was arrested by the Iraqi police, shot
at by the insurgents, kidnapped and beaten by
militants, and then subjected to 5 days of maltreatment by the American military. What enabled him to survive was his Dutch passport.
These experiences find their reflection in the
film, but its focus is on the sufferings of the
Iraqi people, rather than on political issues.
Dreams has a complex time structure, beginning with the Americans shock and awe
bombing of Baghdad in 2003, and ending with
the appearance of U.S. troops on the streets
of Baghdad. The central figures are a doctor
and two patients at a Baghdad psychiatric
hospital destroyed by the U.S. bombing, and
the early parts of the film comprise flashbacks
to 1998, which trace the previous lives of the
three and their sufferings under the Saddam
Hussein regime. Dr. Mehdi had his hopes of
progression blocked because his father was a
on a fellow Arab state and the brutal occupation that followed provoked an immediate response from a startled world community. The
United States, keen to protect its ally (and oil
supplier) Saudi Arabia, organized United Nations Security Council resolutions and a coalition of world governments for its biggest military operation since the Vietnam War. With
total air supremacy and the failure of Iraq to
use any of its alleged weapons of mass destruction, the coalition forces destroyed the bulk of
the Iraqi forces within a hundred hours. But
the Security Council resolutions did not allow for regime change, so the defeated Hussein was able to survive and subsequently to
wreak a savage revenge on thosethe Shia in
the south and the Kurds in the northwho,
wrongly expecting coalition support, had
risen in opposition. President George Bushs
communist, executed by the Baathist regime.

Ali is a patient because of his experiences as
a conscript: being bombed by the Americans,
losing his best friend in battle, and being
tortured as a deserter. Most touching is the
tale of the young Shia woman, Ahlaam (the
name means dreams in Arabic), who was
driven to her collapse when her husband was
arrested and shot on their wedding day. The
tale of her love for Ahmed and the preparations for their wedding are told lyrically and
shot in warm colors, but the visual quality of
the film becomes far bleaker, as the impact
of the Saddam Hussein regime and then the
U.S. invasion is shown. Ali makes a partial recovery and is able to help rescue some of the
patients who have fled from the bombed and
looted hospital. But Ahlaam, clearly the symbol of a tortured Iraq, is left to wander in her
wedding dress through the empty streets of a
nightmarish Baghdad, where she is raped and
abandoned. There is little hope for her at the
end of the film, as she looks out over the 2003
Baghdad skyline from a deserted rooftop.
decision not to overthrow Saddam Hussein

left half completed a mission which his son,
George W. Bush, was more than happy to attempt to finish 12 years later.
In the circumstances, it is not surprising that Iraqi filmmaking has declined since
1980 (little more than a feature a year, including documentaries shot in exile, for the past
28 years). Yves Thoraval picks out the work
of four auteursMohamed Choukri Jamil,
Fayal al-Yassiri, Qays al-Zubaydi, and Qassim Hawalbut these do not have the shared
background and collective identity characteristic of their contemporaries in Syria. Jamil
trained in the United Kingdom, while al-Yassiri and al-Zubaydi (who has worked largely in
Syria) both studied in East Germany and Hawal (much of whose work concerns Palestine)
is a product of the Baghdad Academy of Fine
18
Kilometer Zero (2005, Iraq)
Hiner Saleem, a Kurdish refugee who eventually settled in Paris, set his first feature in
the Kurdish community in Paris and depicts
the journey of a refugee couple in his second.
The bulk of Kilometer Zero, his fourth feature,
takes place in Kurdistan, where it was shot.
The time of the action is 1988, during the IranIraq War and a few weeks after Saddam Hussein launched his poison-gas attack on the
Kurdish village of Halabja. Yet the film is shot
in a sequence of formally controlled shots and
edited with a slow rhythm, which matches
perfectly the temperament of its thoughtful,
somewhat passive hero, Ako. His dreams of
escape are hindered by his wifes bedridden
old father, so Ako finds himself conscripted
into the Iraqi army, to fight for a cause that
is not his. War is depicted as a tragic farce,
boredom interspersed with sudden bombardments, endured by men who dream of a Europe symbolized for them by Anita Ekberg
emerging from the Trevi Fountains in La dolce
vita. Ako is given the task of returning a dead
Kurdish martyr to his home village and the
Art. Their concerns are disparate, and Hawal

describes Jamil and al-Yassiris 1970s works as
faithful to the party line and as ideological
films. He has even complained that Jamil reshot one scene of his 1977 feature, The Houses
in That Alley, when Hawal himself refused to
meet the censors demands.51
What has emerged since the 1980s, however is a cinema of the diaspora, making the
most of experimental, documentary and short
films, often working in difficult conditions
with low budgets of around 10,000 dollars,
and then being faced with great difficulty in
obtaining screenings.52 Among those cited
by Hawal who have made feature-length
works are Maysoon Pachachi (in the United
Kingdom), Samir (Switzerland), Saad Salman
core of the film is his uneasy relationship with

the Iraqi taxi driver, as they drive through an
empty desert landscape. They meet dozens
of similar taxis on a journey that emphasizes their similarities as ordinary people and
their irreconcilable enmity as Arab and Kurd.
Eventually they split up, abandon the coffin,
and Ako is reunited with his family, only to
be bombed again before being miraculously
transported to Paris at the joyous moment of
the fall of Baghdad. The film is marked by bickering incomprehension (between Ako and his
father-in-law and later between him and the
Arab driver) and shot through with moments
of desperate farce (Ako attempting to get his
leg shot off so he will be discharged from the
army, the constant reappearance of lorries
bearing a statue of Saddam Hussein, Akos
dancing battle with the Iraqi flag). Kilometer
Zero is a film that celebrates the spirit of the
Kurdish people under Saddam Husseins rule
but also shows their inseparable difference
from the Iraqi Arabs who rule them.
(France), and Jano Rosebiani (Germany). Four

further foreign-based filmmakersthe team
of Hussein Hasan Ali and Masoud Arif Salih (France), Kassim Abid (United Kingdom),
and Mohamed al-Daradji (the Netherlands
and the United Kingdom)have been active since 2004. Though he does not deal with
these filmmakers explicitly, this is the kind of
diasporic filmmaking so ably analyzed by Hamid Naficy,53 as is indicated by the titles of two
2000s featuresSaad Salmans Baghdad On/
Off and Samirs Forget Baghdad (both 2002)
and the subject matter of two short filmsAbbas Fahdels Back to Babylon (2002) and Tarek
Hashims 16 Hours in Baghdad (2004)each
chronicling the filmmakers return home after
20 or so years.
Introduction
Palestine and Jordan
One of the advocates of a single Arab state,
of which he assumed he would become ruler,
was Hussein, the sharif of Mecca and notional
head of the bedouin tribes, who had allied
himself with the British in World War I. Ironically, two of his sons were among those most
involved in the division of Arab lands into
the separate states which they remain today.
One of the first acts of the British on taking up
their mandate was to split Palestine, by dividing off the territories across the River Jordan
to become a separate entity. At the time, this
portion of Palestine east of the Jordan River
was a largely worthless, mainly desert kingdom.54 Its rule was entrusted to Husseins
second son, Abdullah, who had threatened
trouble by taking his bedouin followers to aid
his brother Feisal, who had just been ousted
by the French in Syria (Feisal was later made
king of Iraq). The main concern of the British
in Jordan was security (particularly against
the bedouin), hence their support for the creation of Abdullahs army, the Arab Legion,
organized by a British officer, John Baggot
Glubb (better known as Glubb Pasha). Abdullah subsequently conspired with the Israelis
in the lead-up to the 1948 war and, when assassinated in Jerusalem, left the kingdom to
his mentally unbalanced son, Talal, who was
forced to abdicate a year later. But against all
odds, the pro-Western Hashemite Kingdom of
Jordan, independent since 1946, survived and
prospered under Abdullahs grandson, Hussein, whose army was strong and loyal enough
to oust the Palestinians threatening to take
over the state in the 1970 Black September
fighting.
Filmmaking in Jordan has been very limited. In the 1950s and 1960s, there are two,
little documented, features produced by the
Palestinian pioneer Ibrahim Hassan Sirhan,
who had been driven into exile into what was
then Trans-Jordan, a patriotic piece by the
Palestinian-born Mohamed Kaouach, and
two 1969 works on the Palestine liberation
struggle by Abdel Wahab al-Hindi. More recently, but 16 years apart, there have been two
19
features whose status as Jordanian has been
contested, the French-financed An Oriental
Story (1991), directed by Najdat Ismal Anzur,
who has dual Jordanian-Syrian nationality,
and Captain Abu Raed (2007), made by Amin
Matalqa, who was brought up and trained in
the United States, where he is now resident
and where he found funding for his film. In
2007, the locally based Mahmoud Massad
made a first feature-length Jordanian documentary, Recycle, shot on video but transferred
to 35mm film. In addition, in the 2000s, there
has been a mass of short documentary work
shot on video, particularly by those associated
with the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative,
set up by Hazim Bitar in 2003.
Edward Said has emphasized that, after
the 1880s, Palestinian history takes a course
peculiar to it, and quite different from Arab
history, since the defining characteristic of
Palestinian historyits traumatic national
encounter with Zionismis unique to the region.55 Under the terms of the mandate, the
British were obliged to set up a Jewish state
in the now diminished Palestinian territory.
Their progress toward this led to complaints
of bias from both Jews and Arabs, and the
years of the mandate were marked by continual disorders, in particular those of 1936
1939, which are referred to by the Arabs as the
Great Arab Revolt, and which the Jews call
the Riots.56 Ghada Karmi captures perfectly
the impact of the 1948 creation of Israel, the
Palestinian nakba or catastrophe, in which
the Arab world found itself confronted with
an alien creation: Its governing ethos was
European and the bulk of its population was
also European . . . The Arabs could neither
understand it nor deal with it.57 The Arab
armies were comprehensively defeated by the
well-organized and intensely motivated Jewish forces, and, within the boundaries of the
new Israel, ethnic cleansing on a massive scale
was undertaken, resulting in the expulsion of
an estimated 750,000 Palestinians from their
lands. Much of this took place between the expiry of the mandate and the United Nations
proclamation of the state of Israel on May 14,
1948. During this 5-month period, the irreg-
20
Fertile Memory (1980, Palestine)
Michel Khleifis first feature-length documentary, Fertile Memory, is one of the founding
films of Palestinian cinema. Khleifi, who was
born in Nazareth, was one of a number of
Arab filmmakers who studied filmmaking at
INSAS in Brussels and went on to work initially for Belgian television. In Fertile Memory,
he juxtaposes the personal stories of two
Palestinian women who are completely unknown to each other. One is Roumia, a widowed grandmother in Jaffa who works in an
Israeli clothing factory. She has lived in poverty since the familys land was expropriated
by the Israelis (who have founded a kibbutz
on it). After 30 years, she still clings to the
land but also to the old ways of living, disapproving of young peoples lives in general,
and her own daughters remarriage in particular. The other, younger, woman, Sahar, lives a
very different life as a divorced single mother
in Ramallah, teaching at Bir Zeit University
and working as a novelist. Both are victims
of the assumptions of Arab patriarchal society (one accepting, at her own cost, the other
rebelling, and thereby causing herself new
ular Palestinian forces were crushed, Palestinian society was pulverised, and the first wave
of refugees was set in motion.58
In the aftermath of the shattering defeat in the 1948 war, the age of exile, refugee
camps, and statelessness began for the Palestinians. For the Arabs as a whole, the years
between 1948 and 1967, which Ilan Pappe
calls the Age of Partition, were immensely
difficult, since Palestine now became a new
geo-political entity, or rather three entities:
the West Bank fully annexed to Jordan, but
without the populations consent or enthusiasm, the Gaza Strip in limbo under military
rule, its inhabitants prevented from entering
Egypt proper, and Israel itself, bent on Judaizing every part of Palestine, and building a
new living organism, the Jewish community
of Israel.59 In this period, as in the years be-
problems), as well as of the the Israeli occupation, which denies Roumia her land rights and
involves Sahar, even if she is not herself a militant, in the student struggle. Fertile Memory
not only comprises two very different stories,
it also involves two documentary procedures,
with Sahar questioned by an unseen interrogator, while Roumia gives her own account,
largely in voice-over, and participates in what
seem to be staged scenes of domestic life.
One focus of the film is on the everyday gestures of the two women, but Khleifi has said
that he intended the film to be not just about
women but also for women. In Fertile Memory, Khleifis fluent camerawork and evocative
use of music also offer a lament for Palestines
lost lands and autonomy. Throughout this
beautifully edited film, there is a concern with
the dignity of simple interior spaces and the
beauty of the empty landscape. The inclusion
toward the end of black-and-white newsreel
footage of the Israeli response to the first intifada adds a fresh poignancy to Khleifis restrained, contemplative stance.
fore 1948, there was virtually nothing that can

be deemed Palestinian cinema, with Gertz
and Khleifi refering only to the work in Jordan of Ibrahim Hassan Sirhan and Mohamed
Kaouach.60
The third Arab-Israeli war (the Six-Day
War in 1967), unlike the second (the Suez crisis), had a profound effect on Palestinian life
and on resistance to Israel. It led to the Israeli
occupation of Palestinian lands which persists
today and to the Palestinians realizing for
certain that there was little or no chance of
fellow Arabs coming to their rescue.61 Palestinian organizations retreated to Jordan and
reshaped themselves there. But their efforts
were fragmented. The overall umbrella organization, the PLO, was dominated by Yasser
Arafats Fatah group, but there were dozens
of other guerrilla groups operating indepen-
Introduction
21
Paradise Now (2005, Palestine)

In interviews dealing with Paradise Now,
Hany Abu Assad has said that his intention
was to do for suicide bombers what Coppolas Godfather films had done for gangsters.
In fact, by drawing on his skills at depicting
the detail of everyday life and at the mixing
of documentary and fiction, Abu Assad has
made a much more compelling and involving
work, particularly for Western audiences used
to the media demonization of Islamic terrorists. Though he begins with the obligatory
scene of an Israeli border crossing point, the
directors emphasis throughout is less on the
physical oppression by the military occupiers
(who caused huge disruptions to the actual
shooting) than on the psychological effects of
occupation and imprisonment on those who
endure it. In a film concerned with murderous
violence, the key moments are not those of
physical action. They are the long-held, silent
close-ups of faces: those of the people closest
to the protagonist, Sad, immediately before
the films climax, and the extreme close-ups
of Sads own eyes throughout the film, par-
dently, the best known of which was George

Habashs Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PFLP). The Palestinians constant
harassment of Israel and its activities within
Jordan (where it became virtually a state
within a state) brought it into conflict with
King Hussein. The hijacking of four Western
airliners led first to a bloody confrontation in
September 1970 (Black September) and then
to the expulsion of Palestinian organizations
to Lebanon.
It was during the late 1960s, in Amman,
that Palestinian cinema was born, with the efforts of the photographic archivist Sulfa Jadallah Mirsal and two exiled Palestinians working for Jordanian television (from which they
acquired their equipment), Mustafa Abu Ali
and Hani Johariya. At this point the definition of Palestinian cinema was unambiguous.
It was for Fatah in Amman that they made No
ticularly early on, when he has his photograph

taken, and at the end, when he is about to
detonate the bombs which will kill him and a
busload of Israeli soldiers. From the start, the
emphasis is on the futile emptiness of the lives
of Sad and his friend Khaled, which offers
them no real future. The directors own viewpoint, that there is an alternative to violence,
can come only from Suha, the pretty girl who
is an outsider to Nablus and to whom Sad is
immediately drawn (as she is to him). There
is no attempt in the film to glorify suicide
bombingthe camera does not work when
Sad and Khaled record their suicide videos,
and both would-be bombers draw back from
their first attempts. Sad was born in a refugee camp and experienced his fathers execution as a collaborator when he was just 10.
When he finally articulates the hopelessness
of his situation, his decision to respond to the
humilation and violence he has experienced
by a suicide bombing becomes only too understandable.
to the Defeatist Solution (1969), and when Fatah was relocated to Beirut, they moved there
too to make With Blood and Spirit (1971). But
later, particularly after the dispersion of Palestinians after their expulsion from Lebanon
in 1975, revolutionary Palestinian cinema
takes on a much broader geographical identity, both in terms of filmmakers and of funding and commissioning sources. Gertz and
Khleifi reckon that over sixty documentary
films were made before 1982.62 Some of these
were the work of Palestinians such as Abu Ali,
Ghalib Shaath, and Ismal Chammout, but
others were directed by filmmakers from other Arab states, such as the Lebanese Rafic Hajjar, Fuad Zantut, and Jean Chamoun, the Jordanian Adnan Madanat, and the Iraqis Samir
Nimr, Qays al-Zubaydi, and Qassim Hawal
(who also later made the feature film Return to
Haifa [1981], from the novel by Ghassan Kana-
22

Divine Intervention (2002, Palestine)
Elia Suleimans second feature-length film,
Divine Intervention, confirms his place as the
most idiosyncratic of Palestinian filmmakers.
It is both highly personal (dedicated to the
memory of his father) and totally stylized,
with the actions of Israeli soldiers constantly
choreographed into balletic movements. The
film has no linear narrative but is structured
as a succession of often absurd or extravagant
incidents. It opens with the frustrations of the
father, mouthing obscenities as he drives past
his smiling neighbors, and ends with the filmmaker sitting side by side with his mother in
the kitchen, watching a boiling pressure cooker. The action in between is watched over, as
always in Suleimans films, by the director in
person as the silent and totally impassive ES,
here accompanied by his unnamed girlfriend
(played by Manal Khader). The film begins in
Nazareth showing a life reduced to violent
repetitive rituals, turning neighbor against
neighbor in a series of senseless acts, all
filmed without comment or explanation with
a static, long-held camera. The life of ES in
fani). In addition, there were a number Lebanese feature films which used Palestine as the
background for melodramatic action films,
and two outstanding works by outsiders:
the Iraqi feature The Duped (directed by the
Egyptian Tewfiq Saleh, 1972), and the Syrian
feature Kafr Kassem (made by the Lebanese
documentarist Borhan Alawiya, 1974). Both
dealt powerfully with Palestinian subjects.
The fourth Arab-Israeli conflict (the Jom
Kippur War) in 1973 and the Organisation
of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
oil embargo redressed somewhat the balance
between the Arabs and Israel and its Western
supporters, but the uneasy peace was shattered by the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon
in 1975. The PLO was deeply involved in this,
and it was a Fatah attack on Israel which provided the trigger for a first Israeli invasion of
Jerusalem is equally frustrating: since Manal

lives in Ramallah, they can meet only in the
car park of an Israeli checkpoint, expressing
their passion only through their clasped and
caressing hands as they sit, otherwise motionless, side by side. The potential violence contained in all the scenes of everyday life finds
glorious expression in a series of wonderful
gags and fantasies. A date pip tossed casually
from his car by the impassive ES on his very
first appearance blows up an Israeli tank in a
huge explosion. The elegant Manal, walking
fearlessly through the checkpoint, reduces the
Israeli guards to juddering wrecks and brings
the observation tower crashing down. A red
balloon adorned with a cartoon of Yasser
Arafats face is released by ES and flies triumphantly over Jerusalem, finally stroking the El
Aksa mosque. In the long penultimate parody
sequence, Manal appears as an avenging
Palestinian ninja figure, moving with surreal grace and magically destroying a team
of trainee Israeli snipers with the emblems of
Palestinian national identity.
Lebanon in 1978. The second (full-scale) Israeli assault in 1981 succeeded in expelling
the PLO from Lebanon, leaving the Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatilla camps
totally at the mercy of Maronite forces, which,
with the complicity of the Israelis, slaughtered
thousands of men, women, and children. It
seemed difficult to imagine a bleaker period
for the Palestinians than the 1970s.
Yet, from the 1980s, the Israelis increased
their pressure on the Palestinians in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip, which they had occupied
and administered since the 1967 war. They
could not simply annex the territories, since
this would have threatened the Jewish majority in an enlarged Israeli state, so they attempted a dual strategy, to destroy all opposition
to Israeli rule, and persuade Palestinians that
life would be better for them outside Israeli-
Introduction
governed territory.63 But the very brutality of
their efforts had the opposite effect: it fostered
the Palestinians sense of national identity and
led to the emergence of two groups violently
opposed to Israels very existence, Hamas and
Islamic Jihad. In 1987, the oppression sparked
off spontaneous protests, particularly by the
young and by children, which became known
as the intifada, which resulted in 626 Palestinian deaths, with 37,500 wounded and 40,000
arrested. The various attempts at a political solution, culminating in the Oslo Accords in the
1990s and more recently the so-called Road
Map, have changed little for the Palestinians,
as the Israelis continue their policy of building new settlements on the West Bank and of
intensifying their occupation. At the time of
writing, after the Israeli assault on Gaza toward the end of 2008, there exists no sign of
the emergence of any kind of viable state for
the Palestinians.
Against this discouraging background,
the emergence of a new generation of Palestinian filmmakers was heralded by Michel Khleifis feature-length documentary Fertile Memory (1980) and two further internationally
shown fictions, Wedding in Galilee (1987) and
The Tale of the Three Jewels (1996). Some of the
newcomers who followed him shared Khleifis
film school background (he had trained at INSAS in Belgium). Ma Masri (much of whose
exclusively documentary work has been done
with her husband, the Lebanese filmmaker
Jean Chamoun) studied at the University of
San Francisco and Ali Nassar at Vsesoyuznyi
Gosudarstvennyi Institut Kinematografii
(VGIK) in Moscow. But many of the other new
Palestinian directors lacked this background.
What they all had in common was a concern
with creating images documenting Palestinian life. As Said has pointed out, the whole
history of the Palestinian struggle has to do
with the desire to be visible. Sixty years after the founding of Israel, the struggle continues to counteract the old Zionist slogan that
Palestine was a land without people seemingly designed for a people without a land.64
Among those who have consistently worked in
documentary are Nizar Hassan and the actor-
23
turned-filmmaker Mohamed Bakri. Most of
the other key figures in Palestinian cinema
have followed the same trajectory as Khleifi in
moving from documentary in the 1980s to fiction in the 1990s: among them, Ali Nassar and
Elia Suleiman, along with Rashid Masharawi
and Hany Abu Assad (who both received some
technical training in the Netherlands). Many
of these filmmakers have lived, or are now resident, abroad, and much of their funding has
come from European television sources. Indeed, Palestinian filmmakers, working under
very dificult circumstances and often at great
physical risk in a context which ex-President
Jimmy Carter has likened to South African
apartheid, have to take their funding where
they can find it. Those who are Israeli citizens
and have taken funding from Israeli government sources have on occasion been subjected
to unjustified criticism by journalists from
other parts of the Arab world, whose individual compromises with their own domestic autocratic regimes are often no more defensible.
But the commitment of Palestinian filmmakers to the cause of their peoplealong with
their talentis unquestionable. As Gertz and
Khleifi observe, since the 1980s, Palestinian
cinema has been striving to maintain a heterogeneous and open nature. The films have
been produced in an era of distress, when the
fate of occupation and repression is shared by
an entire nation struggling to crystallize its
oneness in face of the outside Other. Simultaneously, Palestinian cinema attempts repeatedly, in every possible way, to break down this
image, to take it apart and to reassemble it,
drawing from a mosaic of classes, generations,
genders, regions, and nations.65
The Gulf
Developments in the Gulf over the past 90
years have been quite separate and totally different from those elsewhere in the Arab Mid-
24
The Cruel Sea (1972, Kuwait)
Khalid al-Siddicks independently produced

first feature, made after a number of short
films, looks at Kuwaits past, before the exploitation of the oil which was to make it rich,
and specifically at the struggles of the pearl
fishermen against the sea, which is depicted
as savage and all-powerful. The film begins and ends with long-held images of the
waves, and, throughout, the hardship of the
men battling against natural forces is emphasized. Moussaids father was crippled both by
the sea, which has ruined his eyesight, and a
shark, which bit into his shoulder. But the film
is also a merciless depiction of a traditional
society structured according to wealth rather
than merit, in which there is no place for womens individual wishes or desires. Al-Siddicks
approach is basically realistic (visually more
in the manner of Visconti than Rossellini),
and some of the strongest sequences have a
documentary-style authenticity: the cramped
life of the men during their 4-month voyage
on board the tiny fishing boat is parallelled
by the ceremonies on shore organized col-
dle East (though Kuwait did share the common Middle Eastern experience of invasion
by overwhelming forces, when Saddan Hussein launched his assault in 1990). When the
Ottoman Empire disintegrated in 1918, there
was no move to impose a European solution
on Saudi Arabia or North Yementhey were
simply ignoredand they achieved their independence in 1932 and 1919, respectively. The
five smaller states bordering the Persian Gulf,
which with Saudi Arabia make up the Gulf
Cooperation CouncilOman, the Trucial
States (subsequently the United Arab EmiratesUAE), Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait
were all British protectorates and enjoyed
treaties which prevented them from being
absorbed by their much larger neighbors (Iraq
had what it saw as historic claims to the territory of Kuwait, for example). At the time they
lectively by the womenthe noisy ritual of a

wedding ceremony (where the brides desires
are of no concern) and a chilling sequence on
the beach where a kitten is drowned to ensure the mens safe return. The narrative set
against this background is a simple and conventional one: two young people, Moussaid
and Noura, are in love, but they are separated
by the social forces which keep her cloistered
at home and by the poverty which drives him
out to seek his fortune at sea. His efforts lead
seemingly inevitably to his death but would
in any case have been in vain, since Noura is
married against her will in his absence. Her
wedding night with a rich, much older merchant is depicted unambigiously as a socially
sanctioned rape: her own mother signals to
the musicians to play louder, so as to drown
out the daughters screams. The generation
gap is also revealed in Moussaids struggle
against his father for permission to become
a diver (parallelled, al-Siddick tells us, by his
own struggle to become a filmmaker against
his own fathers wishes).
were backward states, often the personal property of their ruling families, insignificant on
the world stage and religiously conservative in
ways that made their development on Western
democratic lines inconceivable (the links between the Saudi ruling family and fundamentalist Wahabi Islamic sect are well known).
All this changed with the discovery of oil
in the 1930s and its exploitation after World
War II. By the time the Gulf states achieved
independence in the 1960s and 1970s, some
of them were among the richest states in the
world in terms of per capita income, and
Saudia Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE were
on the way to becoming major forces in the
world capitalist financial system, their power
as oil-producing states revealed through the
actions of the oil cartel OPEC. Much of the
Gulf statess immense wealth may have been
Introduction
A New Day in Old Sanaa (2005, Yemen)
The London-born Bader Ben Hirsi chronicled his personal discovery of Yemen, in
the company of the English traveller Tim
Mackintosh-Smith, in his documentary
The English Sheikh and the Yemeni Gentleman. In A New Day in Old Sanaa, he tells
a fictional tale of Yemeni life obliquely, using an Italian photographer, Federico, as
his (English-speaking) narrator. Set in the
picturesque old capital city of Sanaa, the
film tells a tale of passion and misunderstanding, setting the power of love against
the force of tradition. Federicos assistant
Tariq falls passionately in love with his
upper-class fiance Bilquis (whom he has
never met) when he sees herunbelievablywearing the dress he has bought
her and dancing bareheaded in the street
after dark. He is quite unable to cope with
the totally unexpected impact of love, but,
to make things worse, he is mistaken: the
woman who has captured his love is in
fact Ines, a humble girl without a family,
who works as a managasher, applying the
local variant of henna (jet-black nagsh)
to other women, especially to brides.
Tariqs carefully chosen dress, which Ines
is briefly accused of stealing, has in fact
been thrown out into the street by Bilquis,
as only fit for a bedouin. The film captures well both the womens world of gossip and emotion, jealousy and intrigue,
and the emotional immaturity of a young
man like Tariq. Ben Hirsi constructs a deftly
shaped lighthearted narrative, broken up
by snatches of questioning voice-over by
a narrator intrigued by his discoveries of
an unknown culture, and enlivened by musical interludes. Inevitably, tradition wins
out in the end, and Tariq listens to reason
and returns to his fiance, while the disappointed Ines, we are told, returns every
night to wait at the bridge which was to
have been their rendezvous and the start
of their new life together.
25
wasted, but much has also been invested in
hospitals, schools, universities, and television
organizations, leading to profound and unpredictable social changes, including those involving the media. As Nada Mourtada-Sabbah
and her colleagues observe, a market economy armed with sophisticated media ceaselessly bombards the citizens and expatriate
workers alike with messages of consumer (and
secular) behaviour. Very few people can ignore
the visual images seductively enacting dramas
before them.66
Television networks were initially set up
largely to transmit imported material, but
local production has increased, with the Al
Jazeera news network based in Qatar leading
the way by becoming a force in world news
broadcasting and, more recently, in documentary production. The newly educated young,
in particular, are keen to enter the modern
media world, and the new education system,
in the UAE, for example, has provided young
men and women with production skills in
video and with the desire to make full use of
them. Though barely two dozen feature films
have been made in the Gulf since Khalid alSiddicks pioneering The Cruel Sea in 1972,
there is every reason to expect a surge in production in the coming years.
Yemens development has been quite different from that of its neighbors. Divided in
the nineteenth century, the largely unaccessible and reclusive North became independent when the Ottoman Empire disintegrated,
while the South remained a British colony,
better known as Aden. The North (the Yemen
Arab Republic) promptly plunged into civil
war, while Aden successfully fought against
the British for its independence, to emerge
as the Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen. But this independence came to be dependent on Soviet aid, and when that ceased
after the end of the cold war, it was conquered
and swallowed up by its much larger northern
neighbor in 1990. Unsurprisingly, the only Yemeni cinema is a cinema of individual exiles.
26
Middle Eastern Filmmaking

As it has done since the beginning of the
sound era, Egypt continues to dominate Arab
cinema. The three thousand plus Egyptian
feature films produced since the 1920s amount
to three times the number produced in all the
rest of the Arab world put together and, in
terms of box office receipts, the gap is far wider still. But there has been a continuous tradition of filmmaking in both the Arab east (the
Mashreq) and the Arab west (the Maghreb)
since independence, tentative at first, but well
established by the 1960s and 1970s and often
flourishing in the last decade. In terms of output, at around five hundred feature films in
total, the cinemas of the Mashreq (Lebanon,
Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Jordan) are broadly
comparable to those of the Maghreb (Algeria,
Morocco, and Tunisia), and their shared characteristics, as well as the differences between
them, are instructive.
There are many features common to both
Maghreb and Mashreq, the first of which has
already been noted: the work of the tiny handful of pioneers from the 1920s silent era and
the early years of of sound which was spread
thinly across the Arab world. Only in Egypt
and, to a certain extent in Lebanon, does this
pioneering activity lead directly to some kind
of national cinema. Outside these two countries, this pioneering work was followed by
years of silence, and when filmmaking did resume, it was from a quite different base.
Across the many divisions of the Arab
world, a shared sense of commitment is apparent whenever cinema has been called upon to
play its part in the struggle for independence
and against violence. Cinema in Algeria has
its roots in liberation struggle of the late 1950s
and in the filmmaking undertaken as part
of the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN)
struggle by a number of young Algerians, inspired by the French activist Ren Vautier. So
too, at the origins of Palestinian cinema in the
1970s, we find militant filmmakers directly
linked to the groups involved in the liberation
struggle (the PLO, the PFLP, etc.) and working
partially under the umbrella of the Palestinian Film Unit, which was established in 1972.
Though without such precise political affiliations, Lebanese and other Arab documentarists raised their voices against the civil war
which erupted in 1975. In Algeria, the initial
militant impulse finds its immediate echo in
Ahmed Rachedis pioneering compilation film
Dawn of the Damned, the first major film of
the newly independent Algeria. But subsequently, in Algeria, this militant phaselike
the work of the Middle Eastern pioneershas
little direct influence on what is to follow. But
in Palestine and Lebanon, the committed
activity of the 1970s forms the basis for the
powerful surge of documentary filmmaking
across the Arab Middle East, which in turn
helps shape the more tentative emergence (or
re-emergence) of fictional feature filmmaking
from the early 1980s.
Another shared characteristic of filmmaking across the Arab world is the pioneering role played by Europeans at the beginnings
of feature filmmaking. The origins of Egyptian
cinema lie essentially in Cairos cosmopolitan
expatriate community. In Algeria, it was a
Frenchman, Jacques Charby, who shot the first
Algerian-produced feature film after independence. It was another Frenchman, Andr
Chotin, who shot the first feature at the newly
established Baghdad Studio in Iraq in 1948,
just as the German Fritz Kramp was chosen
to inaugurate the Misr Studios in Cairo with
Weddad in 1936. Subsequently European directors working in the Arab world have largely
found their production funding at home and
aimed their work at a wider audience. But
various European film-funding bodies, particularly in France, have played a continuing
vital role in the development of Arab cinema
outside Egypt. For example, the French Fonds
Sud, set up in 1984 and just one of the numerous French film production aid agencies, has
contributed to films by fifty-one Maghrebian
and thirty-two Middle Eastern Arab filmmakers, many of them resident in Europe. Certain Egyptian outsidersYoussef Chahine,
Youri Nasrallah, Asma El-Bakri, Atef Hetata,
and Khaled El-Hagarhave received similar
assistance. The challenges these filmmakers
face in maintaining authentic links to their
homelands, while simultaneously engaging
Introduction
with foreign audiences, are very real, but are,
in many cases, very successfully overcome.
The situation of all these filmmakers is
similar, in that they have to operate as individual auteurs seeking foreign funding for
their work, but their personal reactions, and
hence their filmic approaches and styles, are
very different. These vary sharply from country to country, in response to particular opportunitiesespecially with regard to film
trainingand due to the impact of conflict
and oppression (as chronicled above) in the
specific context within which they have had
to operate. While it is possible to generalize
meaningfully about Maghrebian cinema as a
whole, the work of contemporary Arab filmmakers of the Middle East is much more tied
to local developments within their countries
of origin. Hence the need to deal with each
country or area independently and to bear
constantly in mind the specific political and
economic context.
Authoritarian regimes are the norm in
the Arab world, and attempts to establish state
monopolies for filmmaking have been widespread. But whereas the authorities in Algeria,
Tunisia, and Morocco looked for inspiration
to the Paris Centre National de Cinmato
graphie (CNC), the newly established Baath
regimes in both Syria and Iraq looked to the
Egyptian model, the General Organisation
of Egyptian Cinema set up in Cairo in 1961.
Similarly, while no major Egyptian filmmaker
has worked in the Maghreb since independence (Youssef Chahines Gamila the Algerian
Woman was shot in Egypt in 1958, when the
war was still raging), about twenty Egyptiansincluding some of the leading figures
in Arab cinemahave directed mainstream
feature films for local producers in Lebanon,
Syria, and Iraq.
These differences indicate the further key
underlying distinction between the two areas. Whereas the Maghreb has largely turned
its back on Egypt (from whose popular film
audiences its particular forms of spoken
Arabic largely cut it off) and adopted almost
exclusively the model of auteur film production which has its origins in France, some of
the filmmaking developed in the countries
27
of the Mashreq relates much more directly to
that of Egypt. In the 1960s, with the disruption caused to commericial filmmaking by
the establishment of the state monopoly in
Egypt, there was a serious attempt in Lebanon
to build filmmaking on an industrial model,
so as to rival the Cairo studios. Filmmakers
whose careers resemble those of the prolific
mainstays of Egyptian production emerged,
headed by a trio of LebaneseMohamed Selmane, Samir al-Ghoussayni, and Rida Myassareach of whom spent 20 years or so making up to two dozen commercial features for
distribution throughout the Arab world. The
Lebanese pattern was also followed sporadicallyand with markedly less international
successin Syria and Iraq.
As part of the highly professional organization of its film industry, Egypt has developed an accepted path to filmmaking: years
of study at the Higher Film Institute in Cairo,
followed by a period of work as an assistant director and the making of two or three short
films. None of the governments in the rest of
the Arab world has made use of this pattern
of training, and only a tiny handful of filmmakers from the Maghreb or the Arab Middle
East, none of them major figures, have studied in Cairo (two Moroccans, Imane Mesbahi
and Hassan Moufti, the Palestinian Ghalib
Shaath, and Khalid al-Zadjali, who made the
first Omani feature in 2006).
In the Maghreb, the preferred pattern
has been very different and study in either
France or Belgium has become something of
the norm. In the mid-1970s, the Syrian Omar
Amiralay and a group of Lebanese filmmakers
followed this pattern of training and indeed
remained resident in Europe, among them the
documentarists Borhan Alawiya, Jean Cha
moun, and Jocelyne Saab, as well as the feature filmmakers Maroun Bagdadi and Randa
Chahal-Sabbag. But otherwise there has been
no uniformity in the training of filmmakers in
the Middle East and, from the beginning, directors there have had very diverse introductions to filmmaking.
The aspirations toward establishing commercial patterns of film production, especially
in Lebanon, meant that a number of film-
28
makers there learned their craft as assistant

directors, sometimes in the Egyptian studios.
Among the pioneers of Middle Eastern Arab
filmmaking, those who went abroad to study
travelled in very different directions. The Iraqi
Mohamed Choukri Jamil received most of
his training in London (as a result of working
initially as a documentary filmmaker for the
oil companies), the Kuwaiti Khalid al-Siddick
studied at Poona in India, while Nabil alMaleh from Syria followed courses at FAMU
in Czechoslovakia and the Lebanese feature
filmmaker Ziad Doueiri studied in Los Angeles. Whereas the Palestinian documentarist
Ali Nassar studied in Moscow, his compatriot
Ma Masri graduated from the University of
San Franscisco. The filmmaker who pioneered
the breakthrough for the Palestinian feature
film, Michel Khleifi, studied at the Belgian
film school, INSAS, but most of the Palestinians who followed him a decade or more later
lacked this film school background. Rashid
Masharawi and Hany Abu Assad both had
only limited technical training as cameramen in the Netherlands, while the other 1990s
debutantsPalestines most original feature
filmmaker, Elia Suleiman, and the leading
documentarists, Nizar Hassan and the actor
Mohamed Bakriwere self-taught film directors. By contrast, virtually all the key Syrian
directorsbeginning with Samir Zikra, Mohamed Malas, Oussama Mohammad, and
Abdellatif Abdelhamidtrained in the Soviet
Union.
In the Maghreb, the pattern which predominates is that of the European-trained
filmmaker who turns almost immediately to
feature filmmaking, often with partial funding from Europe and sometimes from a production base there. By contrast, a dozen or
more Middle Eastern Arab filmmakers have
devoted decades of their lives to documentary work, making a large number of highly
individual non-fictional films, some of feature
length and all reflecting the complexities of
life in this troubled region, before turning to
fictional feature filmmaking. Among these,
in addition to Alawiya, Saab, Chamoun, and
Amiralay, are the Palestinians Ma Masri and
Samir Nimr and the Iraqis Qassim Hawal and

Qays al-Zubaydi.
Edward Said argued in 2000 that the
greatest single fact of the past three decades
was the vast human migration attendant upon war, colonisation and decolonisation, eco
nomic and political revolution, and such devastating occurrences as famine, ethnic cleansing
and great power machinations.67 Arab filmmakers from the Maghreb and the Midd le
East have been caught up in this international
development, and, in the 2000s, their filmmaking has become, to a considerable extent,
a cinema of diaspora, with residence abroad
and the receipt of funding from foreign sources becoming almost the norm. Looking from a
2000s perspective, Andrea Khalil sees contemporary North African filmmakers as part of
the Maghrebi diaspora. They travel back and
forth between Europe or North Amerca and
their North African origins, looking to each
shore of the globes waters with the other side
already imprinted on their field of vision.68
The same is true in the Middle East, especially
with regard to the younger filmmakers from
Syria and Iraq.
The diaspora extends throughout the
Middle East and into the present. The only Yemeni features, for example, have been made by
Bader Ben Hirsi, resident in London where he
was born, and Khadija al-Salami, who works
at the Yemeni embassy in Paris. The latest
Iraqi feature filmmaker, Mohamed al-Daradji,
found funding first in the Netherlands and
then in the United Kingdom, where he now
lives. The Jordanian graduate of the American
Film Institute, Amin Matalqa, worked from a
base in Los Angeles to make his first feature.
Similarly, the Lebanese Wajdi Mouawad and
Syrian Ruba Nadda live in Canada, while the
Syrian Hala al-Abdallah Yakoub works as a
producer in Paris.
Filmmakers of this kind, living in enforced exile or, at best, working abroad for
financial reasons, are a common feature of
the contemporary international film scene.
At the same time, there is in the Arab Middle
East and even more in the Gulf at the present time, a constant stream of graduates from
Introduction
local media training establishments within
the Middle East itself: the Academy of Fine
Arts in Baghdad (often known by its French
acronym, ALBA [Acadmie Libanaise des
Beaux Arts]), the media department, Institut
dtudes Scniques et Audiovisuelles (IESAV),
of St. Josephs University in Beirut, and the
Higher Technical Colleges (separate for men
and women) in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. There
are also invaluable individual training efforts,
such as the Amman Filmmakers Collective,
animated by Hazim Bitar, and the Independent Film and Television Academy, run by
Maysoon Pachachi and Kassim Abid, in Baghdad.
But if their backgrounds, opportunities,
and locations are very diverse, there are common cultural factors which shape and influence many of the filmmakers of both Maghreb
and Mashreq. The Tunisian filmmaker Nouri
Bouzid set this out eloquently in his piece on
New Realism in Arab Cinema: The DefeatConscious Cinema in the 1980s.69 For someone of Bouzids generation (he was born in
1945) the key defeat is 1967, but the issue is,
as he sees, not a circumstantial crisis, centralized in one country, but rather a historical, structural crisis rooted in the cultural degeneration which the Arab-Islamic countries
have been experiencing for many centuries
now.70 After independence, cinema became
for young filmmakers a social necessity, and
it was in their hands that it began to assume
a vital role.71 Bouzid includes a number of
(unsourced) quotations from his Middle Eastern contemporaries about the importance of
cinema for them. Michel Khleifi: One of the
many questions that have preoccupied me is
how to portray the Palestinian realityso as
to change it. Mohamed Malas: Our generation has only lived a series of defeats. Questioning and discussion through cinema have
become a must if we are to stand on our own
feet. Borhan Alawiya: We must work toward
the prevention of real defeat, which is division
and then annihilation.72
Looking at the work of his own generation
in the Arab world outside Egypt, Bouzid feels
that the new cinema developed the ego of the
29
director, allowed his creative energy to pour
forth and enabled him to express his opinions
freelyrefusing guardianship and not heeding the censors who continued to watch him
and take him to task over everything he said
and intended to say. It was this quality which
gave the new films a distinctly and intimately
personal flavour ... making the auteur director the pivotal element in the film.73 Bouzids
assessment of the situation in the late 1980s
(the piece was first published in Arabic in AlTariq in 1988) still holds good 20 years later.
What characterizes much of the new Arab
cinema is its attempt to say something new:
Fixed models and clichs are discarded
and, instead, topics and approaches are
as varied as the directors themselves,
each making films that carry their own
mark and are expressive of their particular feelings and thoughts, sorrows and
joys, and sense of self-respect.74
Notes
1. Roy Armes, Dictionary of African Filmmakers (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2008).
2. Ahmad H. Sadi, Reflections on Representations, History, and Moral Accountability, in Ahmad H. Sadi and Lila Abu-Lughod,
eds., Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims
of Memory (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2007), 287288.
3. Jacques Mandelbaum, Au Moyen-Orient, tous les cinastes sont des Palestiniens,
in Jean-Michel Frodon, ed., Au sud du cinma
(Paris: Cahiers du Cinma / Arte ditions,
2004), 63.
4. In a similar vein, the Arab Middle
East is accorded just three pages in Andr Z.
Labarrres 603-page Atlas du cinma (Paris:
Librairie Franaise, 2002), 351353.
30
5. Richard Abel, The Red Rooster Scare:

Making Cinema American, 19001910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), xi.
6. Stewart Ross, The Middle East Since
1945 (London: Hodder Education, 2006), 17.
7. Cited in Jean-Claude Seguin, Alexandre
Promio ou les nigmes de la lumire (Paris:
ditions LHarmattan, 1999), 85.
8. Ibid., 88.
9. Ibid.
10. Cited in Sadi, Reflections, 289.
11. Peter Mansfield, The Arabs (Harmonds
worth, England: Penguin Books, 1980), 185.
12. Justin McCarthy, The Ottoman Peoples
and the End of Empire (London: Arnold,
2001), 163.
13. Ibid., 163164. For an opposing view,
see William R. Polk, Understanding Iraq
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 104107.
14. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991),
120.
15. Ibid., 6.
16. Peter Mansfield, A History of the Middle
East, 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth, England:
Penguin Books, 2003), 156.
17. Polk, Understanding Iraq, 106.
18. McCarthy, The Ottoman Peoples,
163164.
19. Ibid.
20. Hady Zaccak, Le Cinma libanais,
itinraire dun voyage vers linconnu (1929
1996) (Beirut: Dar el-Machreq, 1997), 16.
21. Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi,
Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and
Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2008), 1314.
22. Ghada Karmi, Married to Another
Man: Israels Dilemma in Palestine (London:
Pluto Press, 2007), 1.
23. Ross, The Middle East, 2930.
24. Sandra Mackey, Mirror of the Arab
World: Lebanon in Conflict (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2008), 48.
25. Ibid., 65.
26. Ibid., 66.
27. Zaccak, Le cinma libanais, 23.
28. The Arab Film and Television Centre,

Beirut, published the proceedings of three
roundtable conferences it sponsored on Arab
Cinema and Culture in 1962, 1963, and 1964,
and, as the Interarab Centre of Cinema and
Television, it also published Georges Sadouls
The Cinema in the Arab Countries (1966).
29. Mackey, Mirror, 105.
30. Ross, The Middle East, 29. Though
totally apposite, this is, of course, an internationalnot specifically Arabjoke. On the
evening I typed this I heard it again on television (with different vegetation and climate),
this time told about Wales.
31. Mackey, Mirror, 143.
32. Lina Khatib, Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond (London: I. B.
Tauris, 2008), 188.
33. McCarthy, The Ottoman Peoples, 166.
34. Cited in Barry Rubin, The Truth about
Syria (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007),
2.
35. Ibid., 36.
36. Polk, Understanding Iraq, 109.
37. Rubin, The Truth, 126.
38. Ibid., 44.
39. Ibid.
40. Rasha Salti, Insights into Syrian Cinema
(New York: Arte East / Rattapallax Press,
2006), 61.
41. Ibid., 2122.
42. Ibid., 167.
44. Ibid., 176.
45. Cited in Georgina Howell, Daughter of
the Desert: The Remarkable Life of Gertrude
Bell (London: Macmillan, 2006), 325.
46. Yves Thoraval, Les crans du croissant
fertile (Paris: ditions Sguier, 2002), 18.
47. Shakir Nouri, la recherche du
cinma irakien (19451985) (Paris: ditions
LHarmattan, 1986), 65.
48. Dilip Hiro, Iraq: A Report from the
Inside (London: Granta Publications, 2003),
2829.
50. Hiro, Iraq, 32.
51. Kassem Hawal, Regard sur le cinma
irakien, in Septime Biennale des cinmas
Introduction
arabes (Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe,
2004), 101.
52. Ibid.
53. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema:
Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).
55. Edward Said, The Question of Palestine
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980),
ix.
56. Gertz and Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema,
54.
57. Karmi, Married to Another Man, 11.
58. Avi Shlaim, No Sentiments in War,
Guardian (London), May 31, 2008, 8.
59. Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land Two Peoples (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 140.
1920.
22.
64. Edward Said, preface to Dreams of a
Nation: On Palestinian Cinema, by Hamid
Dabashi (London: Verso, 2006), 2.
31
8.
66. Nada Mourtada-Sabbah, Mohamed
al-Mutawa, John W. Fox, and Tim Walters,
Media as Social Matrix in the United Arab
Emirates, in Alanoud Alsharekh and Robert
Springborg, eds., Popular Culture and Political Identity in the Arab Gulf States (London:
Saqi and London Middle East Institute
SOAS), 2008, 121.
67. Edward Said, Reflections on Exile (London: Granta Books, 2001), xiv.
68. Andrea Khalil, introduction to North
African Cinema in a Global Perspective:
Through the Lens of Diaspora (London: Routledge, 2008), ix.
69. Nouri Bouzid, New Realism in Arab
Cinema: The Defeat-Conscious Cinema, Alif
15 (1995): 242250.
70. Ibid., 242.
71. Ibid., 243.
72. Ibid., 243.
73. Ibid., 247.
74. Ibid., 250.
Part One
Dictionary of
Filmmakers
Abbas, Hiam. Palestinian filmmaker and actress. Born in 1960 in Nazareth, she has lived
in France since 1989. She studied photography
before turning to acting in 1983. Since playing
the lead in Michel Khleifis Palestinian Wedding in Galilee (1987), she has starred in a dozen or more major Arab films, including two
Lebanese productionsRashid Masharawis
Haifa and Danielle Arbids Raddem; two Tunisian featuresRaja Amaris Satin Rouge,
and Moufida Tlatlis Nadia and Sara; two
dealing with the immigrant community in
FranceChristophe Ruggias Le Gne de
chaaba and Bourlem Guerdjous Living in
Paradise; as well as Ahmed Boulanes Moroccan feature Ali, Rabia and the Others, and the
Egyptian Yousry Nasrallahs Gate of the Sun.
Short films: Bread / Le pain / al-Khubz (2000,
18', 35mm), The Eternal Dance / La danse ternelle / al-Raqisa al-abadiya (2003, 26', 35mm).
Abbas, Hussain Ghulom (Abu Jalal). Bahraini filmmaker. Born in 1947, he studied
filmmaking in Tehran and worked there for
some years. He also worked in television.
Short films: Black Bag (1968), Compunction
(2005, 52', DVD).
Abbas, Mustafa. Emirati filmmaker. He studied filmmaking at the Hollywood Film Institute and has written and directed a number of
amateur films. Short film (with English dialogue): 100 Miles (2007, 26', Mini DV).
Abboud, Anne-Marie. Lebanese filmmaker.
She studied filmmaking at Fine Arts Institute in Beirut. Short fictional film: Portrait of
Memories (2000, 17').
Abboud, Marwa. Emirati filmmaker. Born in

1983, she studied at the American University
of Sharjah. Short documentary film: Egoism
(2004, 11', Mini DV).
Abboud, Taysir. Lebanese filmmaker.
Feature films: The Madness of Adolescent Girls
/ La folie des adolescentes / Jounoun al-mourahikat (1969), The Bells of Return / Les cloches
du retour / Ajrass al-awda (1969), Forgive Me,
My Love / Pardonne-moi mon amour / Samehni habibi (1981).
Abdalla, Hussain Nabil. Emirati filmmaker.
Born and raised in the UAE, of Palestinian descent, he studied at the American University
of Sharjah. Short films: 48 and After (2007, 2',
DVD), Too Much Work (2007, 1', Mini DV).
Abdallah, Ghassan. Syrian filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Daydreams / Ahlam mountasaf
al-daheera (2005, 7', 35mm).
Abdallah, Mona. Emirati filmmaker. She was
born in 1988 in Benghazi, Libya, and lived in
Lebanon before moving to the UAE. She studied at the American University of Sharjah.
Short films: Bait (2007, 3', Mini DV), Break In
(2007, 3', Mini DV), Aftermath (2007, 2', Mini
DV).
Abdallah, Samir. Palestinian filmmaker. Born in 1959 in Denmark, he has lived in
France since the age of 6 and has French nationality. He has made numerous short documentary films. Feature-length documentaries:
We Shall Return One Day / Nous retournerons
un jour (with Walid Charara, 1998, 90', video),
36
Writers on the Borders, a Journey to Palestine

/ crivains des frontires (with Jose Reynes,
2004, 80', DV Cam), After the War ... / Aprs
la guerre, cest toujours la guerre (in Lebanon,
2008, 82', DigiBeta).
Abdelaziz, Faleh. Iraqi filmmaker. Feature film: Return to the Countryside / Retour
la campagne / Al-awda lil rif (1963, 35mm).
Abdelhadi, Walid. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short film: Nours Dream (2006).
Abdelhamid, Abdellatif. Syrian
filmmaker. Born in 1954 in Lattakiah, he first
studied Arabic literature at university in his
hometown, then filmmaking at the Moscow
film school, VGIK, where he graduated in
1981. He has appeared as an actor in films by
Mohamed Malas and Oussama Mohammad.
His short and documentary films include
three made during his studies: Good Night /
Bonne nuit / Tushibuna ... ala-Khayr, An Old
Lesson / Une ancienne leon / Darsun qadima,
Upside Down / Sens dessus dessous / Raas ala
aqib (1981). After graduating, he made further
documentaries: Desires a.k.a. Wishes / Dsirs
/ Umnyat (1983), Our Hands / Nos mains /
Aydeena (1984, 21'). In 1985, he wrote and directed a television serial, Two Weeks and Five
Months / Usbuan wa khamsat shuhur. Feature
films: The Nights of the Jackal / Les nuits du
chacal / Layali ibn awa (1989, 95', 35mm), Verbal Messages / Lettres orales / Rasail al shafahyya (1991, 105', 35mm), The Rising Rain /
La monte de la pluie / Suud al-matar (1996,
90', 35mm), Breeze of the Soul / Le souffle de
lme / Nassim ar-ruh (1998, 90', 35mm), Two
Moons and an Olive Tree a.k.a. Qamaran and
Zeltouna / Deux lunes et un olivier / Qamarn
wa zayrunah (2001, 90', 35mm), At Our Listeners Request / Au plaisir des auditeurs / Ma yatlubuhu al-mustamiun (2003, 89', 35mm), Out
of Coverage / Hors rseau / Kahref al-taghtiya
(2007, 100', 35mm), Days of Boredom / Jours
dennui / Ayyam al-dajar (2008).
Abdelrahman, Firas. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short film: Rachels War (2003).
Abdelwahed, Naima. Emirati filmmaker.

Short film: Anti-Gendercide (with Farha
Moon, 2007, 1', Mini DV).
Abdou, Sara Tarek. Emirati filmmaker. Studied at the American University of Sharjah.
Short fictional film: Eruption (2006, 3', Mini
DV).
Abdul Azeem, Hani. Emirati filmmaker.
Short documentary films: Medicine School: A
Story of Success (2001, 13', Beta SP), The Emirates Date Factory in Al-Sad (2001, 20', Beta SP).
Abdulamir, Layth. Iraqi filmmaker.
Born in 1957 in Iraq, he studied film at the
Sorbonne in Paris (19771980) and at the Fine
Art Institute in Kiev (19801986). He made
three short films, Night Chat, President, and
Death, in 19821985. He subsequently worked
in Kiev and then for French and Dubai television. Short fictional films: The Cradle / Le berceau (1985, 21', Beta SP), Sunflower (2005, 20',
16mm). Feature-length documentary: Iraq:
The Song of the Missing Men / Irak, le chant des
absents (in France, 2005, 93', DV Cam).
Abdulaziz, Samantha. Emirati filmmaker.
She studied at the American University of
Sharjah. Short fictional film: Where the Lost
Things Go (2007, 4', Mini DV).
Abdulkhalek, Heba. Emirati filmmaker.
Short film: Dont Drink and Drive (with Bandar al-Mandeel, 2000, 1', Mini DV).
Abdulla, Abdulla Abdulaziz. Qatari filmmaker. He studied at the Higher Institute of
Arts in Kuwait. He works for Qatar TV and
is also a stage director. Short film: From the
Darkness to the Bright (2005, 7', Mini DV).
Abdulla, Hafez Ali. Qatari filmmaker. Born
in 1975 in Doha, in Qatar, he studied drama at
the California Arts Institute and then directing at the Chapman University in California.
He has made a number of short fictional films,
including Faces of Qatar / Visages du Qatar
(2001), For You Alone / Pour toi seul (2002), Im
at Home / Je suis chez moi (2003), Taxi Driver /
Chauffeur de taxi (2005, 19', Beta SP).
Abdulla, Suhail Matar. Emirati filmmaker.
Studied at Dubai Mens College. Short films:
Mis-Used Freedom (2007, 2', DV Cam), Innocent Souls (2007, 2', DV Cam).
Abdulla, Wedima Bilal. Emirati filmmaker.
She studied at Abu Dhabi Womens College.
Short fictional film: Kids Revenge (2003, 2',
DV Cam).
Abdullah, Bilal. Emirati filmmaker. An actor
in ten short films. Short fictional film: Sunset
(2002, 51', DV Cam).
Abdullah, Khalid. Emirati filmmaker. Studied at the American University of Sharjah.
Short film: Alcoholism (with Fatma Almushrrakh, 1', Mini DV).
Abdullah, Yahya. Jordanian filmmaker. Born
in 1978 in Lebanon, he studied literature at the
University of Amman in Jordan, where he now
teaches. He also studied filmmaking in Paris
and works as a literary critic. He has made a
number of short films: The Arab Citizen / Le
citoyen arabe, Gentle Grandmother / La gentille grand-mre (2004), Family-Sized Middle
East / lchelle familale (2004), Six Minutes
/ Six minutes (2005, 15', DV Cam), Colouring / Coloriage (2005), Hello, Hello / All, all
(2005), A Man in a Cup / Un homme dans la
tasse (2005, 5', Beta SP), Six Minutes (2005, 15',
video), Pummelo (with Aseel Mansour, 2008,
29', DigiBeta), SMS (2008, 17', video).
Abdulrahman, Dawood Mohammed Hassan. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at Dubai
Mens College. Short films: Al Bidyah Mosque
(2002, 6', Beta SP), Sooner or Later (2003, 1',
DV Cam), Faith and Friendship (2003, 18', DV
Cam), Innocent Dreams (2004, 6', DV Cam).
Abed, Adel. Emirati filmmaker. Short film:
The Soul (2001, 12', Beta SP).
Abi Aad, Serena. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
film: The Lullaby (2007, 19').
37
Abi Khalil, Jad. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1973 in Beirut, he studied filmmaking at
IESAV in Beirut. Short films: Mediterranean
Hereditary Blood Medicines / Les mdecines
sanguines hrditaires mditerranennes
(1997), Just as My Confessor Told Me / Tel
que mon confesseur me la rapport (1999, 21',
35mm), Sorry / Dommage / Rahet ya haram
(2002, 17', video). Your Majesty Mr. President
(2003, 50'), Thirty (2003, 14').
Abi Samra, Maher. Lebanese filmmaker.
Born in 1965 in Beirut, he studied at the
Academy of Fine Arts in Beirut. Short films,
mostly documentaries: Syndromes of Return
/ Syndromes de retour (1993), Building on the
Waves / Btir sur les vagues (with Jrome Allamargot and Aldo Pancari, 1995, 26', 16mm),
Hezbollah: Party of Gods / Hezbollah: parti de
dieu (1996), Shatila Roundabout / Rond-point
Chatila (2004, 51', video), Merely a Smell (2007,
11').
Abi Wardeh, Hady. Lebanese filmmaker.
Studied filmmaking at IESAV in Beirut. Short
fictional film: Broken Dream / Rve bris
(2000, 14').
Abid, Kassim. Iraqi filmmaker. Studied at
the Institute of Arts in Baghdad and at VGIK in
Moscow. He has lived in the United Kingdom
since 1982. In 2003, with Maysoon Pachachi
he set up an Independent Film & TV College
in Baghdad. He has also taught at the Birzeit
University in Palestine. Short films: Amid
the Alien Corn / Dans les champs tranges de
mas (1991, 38', 36mm), Naji al-Ali, an Artist
with Vision / Naji al-Ali, un artiste visionnaire
(1998, 60', Beta SP), Surda Checkpoint (2005,
30', video). Feature-length documentary: Life
After the Fall / La vie aprs la chute / Hatay ma
baad al-suqoot (2008, 155', DigiBeta).
Abou Samah, Nicolas. Lebanese filmmaker. He worked in television. Feature film:
Charbel / Charbel (1966, 35mm).
Abou Seif, Salah.* Egyptian filmmaker
who directed one Iraqi feature film: The Battle
38
of Al-Qdissiya / La bataille dAl-Qdissiya /

al-Qdissia (1981).
Abou Zeid, Ahmad. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short film: Palestine, 52 Years of Occupation /
Palestine, 52 ans doccupation (2000, 10', Beta
SP).
Aboubayda, Abdulrahman. Emirati filmmaker. Short film: Careless Driving (2007, 1',
Mini DV).
Aboujarad, Mohamed. Jordanian filmmaker
and member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. He studied at Yarmouk University
and works as a computer network administrator. Short film: What a Job / Quel boulot (with
Hazim Bitar and Omar Saleh, 2006, 7', DV
Cam).
Aboulhosn, Zeina. Lebanese filmmaker.
Documentaries: Zeids Little Bomb (2006, 5'),
Staying Alive (2006, 8'), I Remember Lebanon
(2006, 6').
Abousaif, Sajeda. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. She studied Islamic jurisprudence
and works as a teacher. Short films: Free to
Fly (with Alabbas Saed, 2006, 6'), Emergency
(2007).
Abu al-Ala, Amjad. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied mass communication at UAE University and subsequently worked in television.
Student films: In the End of the Fall (2001, 8',
Beta SP), The Slump on Cannes Roads (2003,
14', Beta SP), On the Pavement of the Soul
(2004, 31', DV Cam). Short fictional films: Coffee and Orange (2005, 19', Mini DV), Feather of
the Birds (2006, 32', Mini DV).
Abu Ali, Khadija. Palestinian filmmaker.
Wife of Mustafa Abu Ali. Documentaries:
Children, but ... / Des enfants, mais ... / Atfal,
wa lakin (1981, 23', 16mm), Women for Palestine / Nisaaon min Filastin (1982).
Abu Ali, Mustafa. Jordanian filmmaker. Husband of Khadija Abu Ali. Founder of the Palestine Film Organisation. Many of his early
films were made collectively under his leadership. Short films: The Palestinians Right / Le
droit palestinien / al-Hak al-falastini (1969, 8'),
Reportage / Ribottj (1969), No to the Defeatist
Solution / Non la solution dfaitiste / L li-l
hall es-simy (collective, 1969, 20', 16mm), With
Our Souls, with Our Blood a.k.a. With Blood
and Spirit / De toute mon me et avec mon sang
/ Bi al-ruh, bi al-dam (collective, 1971), Fatah
Land / Le Fathahland / al-Arqoub (1972, 25',
16mm), Zionist Aggression / Agression sioniste / Adwan sahyuni (1972, 22', 16mm), The
Achilles Heel / al-Arqub (1972), Scenes from
the Occupation of Gaza / Scnes doccupation
Gaza / Mashahid min al-ihtilal fi Ghazeh
(1973), Palestinian Newsreels 1 & 2 / Actualits Palestiniennes 1 & 2 / Jarida filistin eththawra-l-muawara (1974), They Do Not Exist
/ Ils nexistent pas / Laysa lahum wujud (1974,
26', 16mm), On the Road to Victory / Le chemin
de la victoire / Tariq al-nasr (1975, 15', 16mm),
Tel al-Zatar (with Jean Chamoun and Pino
Adriano, 1977), Palestine in the Eye / Filastin
fi al-ayn (1977).
Abu Alwan, Amani. Lebanese filmmaker.
Born in 1977 in Beirut, she studied at IESAV,
then worked in the theatre and for television
as a sound engineer, assistant director, and
editor. Documentary: Zanzoun (2000, 21', Beta
SP).
Abu Assad, Hany. Palestinian filmmaker. Born in 1961 in Nazareth, he worked
initially as an aeronautical engineer in the
Netherlands, where he subsequently trained
as a cameraman. On his return to Palestine,
he worked as a television producer, turning to
cinema to collaborate with Rashid Masharawi.
He worked as assistant on the latters documentary, House, Houses (1991), then produced
Long Days in Gaza (1991) and Masharawis
first feature, Curfew (1993). Abu Assad began his own directing career in 1991, with the
short documentary To Whom It May Concern
(1991, 15'), followed by two fictional shorts,
including A Paper House / Une maison en papier / Bayt min waraq (1992, 28', 16mm). His
documentaries include Sanctuary / Sanctuaire
/ Taht al-mahjar (2000), Nazareth 2000 / Nasseriyya 2000 (2001, 55'). His first feature was
a Dutch-language comedy romance. Feature
films: The Fourteenth Chick / Le quatorzime
poussin / Het veertiende kippetje (1998, 88'),
Ford Transit (2002, 81', documentary), Ranas
Wedding / Le mariage de Rana / Urs Rana
(2002, 90', 35mm), Paradise Now / al-Jinna
alaam (2005, 90', 35mm).
Abu Dayyeh, Mohamed. Palestinian filmmaker. Short film: My Dad Is Late / Mon pre
est en retard / Taakhar abi (2003).
Abu Diqqa, Wael. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short films: Exile / Lexile / al-Ghyrba (1998),
Checkpoints / Points de contrle / al-Hawajiz
(2000).
Abu Ghoush, Dima. Palestinian filmmaker.
Shorts: At the Checkpoint / Au point de contrle
(2004), Good Morning, Qalqiliya / Bonjour,
Qaqiliya / Sabah al-khayr Qalqiliya (2004, 26',
video), My Palestine (2007, 10').
Abu Goumazah, Khalid Mahmoud. Emirati
filmmaker. He studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short film: Choose Your
Path (with Joud Odeh, 2007, 1', Mini DV).
Abu Haidar, Lamia. Lebanese filmmaker.
Debut documentary: Lost Childhood / Enfance perdue (with Maria Ousseimi, 1992, 40',
16mm).
Abu Hanna, Umayya. Palestinian filmmaker.
Born in 1961 in Haifa, Israel, where she was
educated, she moved in 1981 to Helsinki,
where she studied radio and television journalism. She has worked as a radio and television reporter in Finland. Documentary: My
Homeland (1993).
Abu Hmud, Saed. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short film: Second Halftime (2005).
39
Abu Nawas, Shamma. Emirati filmmaker.
She studied communication technology at
Dubai Womens College. Short film: Im a
Man / Ana rajol (with Sahar al-Khatib, 2006,
19', Mini DV).
Abu Rish, Darwish. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short film: The Man from Haifa / Lhomme de
Hafa / Haifawi (1999).
Abu Sada, Ahmad. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short films: A Guerrillas Diary / Youmiyyat
fidai (1969), On the Vanguard / Maa al-talai
(1970).
Abu Salem, Franois. Palestinian filmmaker.
Documentaries: Bread and Salt / Aysh wa milh
(1976), Jerusalem ... Gates of the City / Jrusalem ... Les portes de la ville / al-Quds abwab
al-madina (1995).
Abu Wael, Tawfik. Palestinian filmmaker. Born in 1976 in Um El-Fahem, he graduated in film studies from Tel Aviv University
and worked in the university archive, 1996
1998. Then, in 19971999, he taught drama at
the Hassan Arafa School in Jaffa. Short films:
Waiting for Saladin / En attendant Saladin /
Fintithar Salah-Eddin (2001, 53', Beta SP), Diary of a Male Whore / Journal dun prostitu
mle / Yawmiyat ahir (2001, 14', Beta SP), The
Fourteen / Le quatorze / Rabe ashar (2002,
13', video). He also contributed one episode to
the collectively made video documentary One
More Time (Five Stories about Human Rights
in Palestine / Une fois encore (cinq histoires sur
les droits de lhomme en Palestine) (with Nada
al-Yassir, Ismal Habash, Abdel Salam Shehada, Najwa Najjar, 2002, 57', Beta SP). Feature film: Thirst / La soif / Atash (2004, 110',
35mm).
Aburahme, Dahna. Palestinian filmmaker.
Of Palestinian origin, she grew up in Amman,
Dubai, and Beiruit, and studied video and
media in New York. Short films: Palestine Is
Waiting / La Palestine attend (with Annemarie
Jacir and Suzy Salmy, 2003), Until When . . .
(2004).
40
Adam, Hermeen Kamel. Emirati filmmaker.

Short film: Katkoot (with Salma Khaifa AlDarmaki, 2007, 26', DVD).
Adel, Jaidaa. Emirati filmmaker. Short film:
Sense of Detection (with Ramzy Shuhaiber,
2007, 8', Mini DV).
Adelkrim, Tarek. Iraqi filmmaker. Documentary: Art in the Conflict / Lart dans le combat /
Fan wa maraka (1969).
Adhami, Reema. Emirati filmmaker. Short
film: Enigmatic (2007, 6', Mini DV).
Adwan, Abdel Menem. Palestinian filmaker.
Now living in Europe and working mainly
in television. Documentary: About the Other
/ Au sujet de lautre / An al-akhar (2004, 13',
Mini DV).
Agha, Akram. Saudi filmmaker. Short film:
Intabih (2005, 3', video).
Agrama, Farouk.* Egyptian filmmaker
who made one Lebanese feature film: The Conquerors / Les conqurants / al-Kahiroun (1966,
35mm).
Ahmad, Asma. Emirati filmmaker. Short
film: Mission of Hope / Mashroo amal (with
Aisha Mohamed Obaid al-Muhairi, 2008, 21',
Mini DV).
Ahmad, Nazima. Emirati filmmaker. She
studied at the American University of Sharjah but has spent most of her life in Pakistan.
Short animated film: Compact Void (2006, 2',
DV Cam).
Ahmaro, Amir. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
documentary film: Prayers for the Patient
(2007, 24').
Ahmed, Abdul Rahman Abubaker. Emirati filmmaker. Born in 1969, he studied mass
communication at UAE University. Short
films: Impossible Interview (2001, 26', Beta SP),
Khararif (2002, 12', Beta SP).
Ahmed, Abdullah Hassan. Emirati filmmaker. Born in 1978 in the UEA, he works as director for the Sama television channel in Dubai.
Also worked as cameraman on a number
of short films. Short films: The Nail / Longle
(2002, 6', Beta SP), The Swing / Loscillation
(2003, 21', DV Cam), The Rise of the Doing
(2004, 25', Mini DV), Fan Clip (2004, 4', Mini
DV), 01'03 (with eleven other directors, 2004,
12', Mini DV), Yahoo (2004, 35', DV Cam),
Amen / Ameen (2005, 15', Mini DV), Al-Fustan (2005, 28', Mini DV), Small Sky / Petit ciel /
Sama sagheera (with Omar Ibrahim, 2006, 14',
Mini DV), Summer Birds (2007, 19', Mini DV).
Ahmed, Ahmed Abdulla. Emirati filmmaker.
He studied at Dubai Mens College. Short film:
Innocent Eyes (2005, 3', Mini DV).
Ahmed, Asma. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at Dubai Womens College. Short film:
Speeding (2006, 1', Mini DV).
Ahmed, Bader. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at Dubai Mens College. Short film: Speed
Maniacs (2006, 11', Mini DV).
Ahmed, Imad. Palestinian filmmaker. He
worked as a cameraman for news and documentaries in Ramallah. Documentaries: Local
/ Mahalli (with Ismal Habash and Raed alHelou, 2002), Poppa / Papa / Buba (2004).
Ahmed, Roqia Murad Mohammed. Emirati
filmmaker. She studied at UAE University.
Short animated films: Drop of Water (2004, 2',
DVD), Suffering of a Blind Boy (2004, 5', DVD).
Ahmed, Yousef Hussain. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at Dubai Mens College. Short
films: Before You Drive (2002, 1', DV Cam),
Statistics (2002, 1', DV Cam).
Ajajah, Mahmoud Salem Ba. Saudi filmmaker. He has worked extensively in theatre and
television. Short films: Affiliation (with Mahdi
Ali Ali and Dalia Bakhet, 2007, 9', Mini DV),
Full Moon Night / Laylat al-badr (2007, 31',
Mini DV), A Childs Task (2008, 18', Mini DV).
Ajffar, Ali Mohammad. Kuwaiti filmmaker.
Born in 1960, he became an amateur filmmaker while still at college. Short film: Matrix
Reloaded (2006, 26', DV Cam).
Ajram, Ajram. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1969 in South Lebanon, he studied at the Institute of Dramatic Art and worked on cultural
programs for children. Short films: The Nightmare / Le cauchemar (1996), Abdo (with Tania
El Khoury, 25', Beta SP).
Akad, Bachar. Syrian filmmaker. Short documentary film: Pages from the Golan / Pages du
Golan / afahtun mina-l Julan (1974).
Akaf, Kamel. Iraqi filmmaker. Documentary:
A Peoples Tragedy / La tragdie dun peuple /
Massat chaab (1968).
Akaron, Myrna. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Adult Story / Conte dadulte
(2000, 14').
Akiki, Philippe. Lebanese filmmaker
and actor. He worked as an actor and also as
director of photography for several pioneer
filmmakers, including Michel Haroun (Red
Flowers, 1957). He directed just one feature
and died in 1995. Feature film: The Realm of
the Poor / Le royaume des pauvres / Mamlakat
al-foukara (1967).
Akkachi, Marouan. Syrian filmmaker.
Feature film: The Heros Stormcloud / La nue
du hros (1974, 35mm).
Akkad, Mustapha. Syrian filmmaker.
Born in 1933 in Aleppo, he studied filmmaking at UCLA. He worked as assistant to Sam
Peckinpah on Ride the High Country before
setting up his own production company to
make documentary and fictional films. He
later produced John Carpenters Halloween in
the United States. His own two feature films
as director are international co-productions
made with Hollywood stars. He was killed in
a terrorist attack in Jordan in 2008. Feature
films: The Message / Le message / al-Risala
41
(1975, 35mm), Lion of the Desert / Le lion du
dsert / Omar al-Mukhtar (1980, 117', 35mm).
Al-Abdallah Yakoub, Hala. Syrian
filmmaker. Born in 1956 in Hama, she studied
first agricultural engineering at the University
of Damascus and then anthropology at the
EHESS in Paris and filmmaking at the Universit de Paris VIII. She worked as assistant
to Oussama Mohammad for Stars in Broad
Daylight and Mohamed Malas for The Night.
She joined Ramad Films in Paris and worked
as producer for its founder, Omar Amiralay,
on several films. Documentary feature films: I
Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her Grave
/ Je suis celle qui porte les fleurs vers sa tombe
(with Ammar al-Beik, 2006, 110', video), Hey!
Dont Forget the Cumin / H! Noublie pas le
cumin (2008, 66', DigiBeta).
Al-Abdool, Ali. Emirati filmmaker. He has
worked extensively in television and commercials. Fictional film: Wayfarer (1989, 75', Beta
SP).
Al-Abdooli, Khalil Ibrahim. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at Dubai Mens College.
Short films, one documentary: The Raging
Bulls of Fujairah (2002, 5', Beta SP), and two
fiction: Who Let the Dog Out (2003, 19', DV
Cam), Devils Wood (2004, 16', DV Cam).
Al-Abidi, Hisham Mansour. Saudi filmmaker. Short fictional film: Gregeaan Mbarak
(2005, 14', DV Cam).
Al-Adwani, Humaid. Omani filmmaker. He
studied film and media production in Australia and works at Sultan Qaboos University. His
short film was made in collaboration with an
independent woman filmmaker from Australia. Short film: For Night Another Sun (with
Tani Bodini, 2006, 7', DV Cam).
Al-Aidarous, Khadher. Emirati filmmaker.
He studied at Columbia University, Hollywood, and at the American Film Institute in
Los Angeles and subsequently worked in television in Abu Dhabi. Short documentary film:
Innocent Voices (2003, 37', DigiBeta).
42
Al-Akawi, Alaa Mohammed. Emirati filmmaker. Of Syrian origin, but raised in the
UAE, he studied at the American University
of Sharjah. Short films: Reincarnation (2004,
21', Mini DV), Spiritual Hunt (2004, 14', Mini
DV).
Al-Ali, Ali. Bahraini filmmaker. Short films:
Alyaqada (2006, 27', DV Cam), The Radical
Solution (2007, 34', DV Cam), Bloodlust (2007,
15', DV Cam), Abbass Homeland (2007, 12', DV
Cam).
Al-Ali, Masoud Amralla. Emirati filmmaker.
Short fictional film: Al-Rumram (1994, 24', Hi8).
Alameer, Ali Hasan Mohamed. Saudi filmmaker. Born in 1981, he began his career in
1995. Short fictional and experimental films:
The Lost Dream (2003, 30', DV Cam), Child of
Heaven (2006, 21', Mini DV).
Al-Ameri, Saeeda. Emirati filmmaker. She
studied at Abu Dhabi Womens College. Short
documentary film: Al Shallah (2000, 5', DV
Cam).
Al-Amoodi, Reem. Emirati filmmaker. She
studied at Dubai Womens College. Short
films: Paranoia (2006, 1', Mini DV), Hard to
Fix (2006, 1', Mini DV).
Alamuddin, Rana. Lebanese filmmaker. She
studied audio-visual media and worked as a
journalist for the Beirut Times. Short films:
Boys First . . . Ladies After (1998), Murur alkiram (1999).
Al-Ansari, Mohamed. Iraqi filmmaker.
Feature film: Lifes Lesson / La leon de vie /
Ababathu al-hayat (1958, 35mm).
Al-Aqeeli, Sara. Emirati filmmaker. She was
born in 1978 in Dubai. Short fictional film:
Swing (2002, 8', Mini DV).
Al-Ariss, Ali. Pioneer Lebanese filmmaker. Born in 1909, he worked in the theatre in
Egypt before returning to Lebanon to make

two feature films. After a further documentary film, Al-Ariss abandoned the cinema. He
died in 1965. Feature films: The Flower Seller /
La vendeuse de fleurs / Bayyaat al-ward (1943,
35mm), Kawkab, Princess of the Desert / Kaw
kab, princesse du dsert a.k.a. Ltoile du Sahara / Kawkab amirat as-sahra (1946, 35mm).
Al-Arouj, Meshari. Kuwaiti filmmaker. Has
worked for some years as cameraman and
graphic designer in Kuwaiti TV. Short animated film: No Random Fishing (2006, 2', DVD).
Al-Ashoor, Zinab. Emirati filmmaker. Born
in 1980, she studied at Abu Dhabi Womens
College. Short films: Romantic Poetry (2001, 7',
DV Cam), Cornflakes (2001, 1', DV Cam), Cruel Reality (2002, 7', DV Cam), All That Glitters
Is Not Gold (2002, 5', DV Cam).
Al-Ashqar, Akram. Palestinian filmmaker.
Documentary: First Picture (2006, 27'). Contributed Red, Dead and Mediterranean (1' 25")
to the collective film Summer 2006, Palestine
(2006, 35', Beta SP).
Al-Askari, Lama. Emirati filmmaker. Born in
1985 in Abu Dhabi, of Palestinian/Lebanese
origin, she studied at the American University
of Sharjah. Short fictional film: Her (2004, 5',
Mini DV).
Alatar, Mohamed. Palestinian filmmaker.
Documentary: Jerusalem ... the East Side Story (2008, 56').
Al-Awadi, Nadia Ahmed. Emirati filmmaker.
She studied at Dubai Womens College. Short
documentary film: Between Dream and Reality of an Airhostess (2001, 4', Beta SP).
Al-Awadi, Walid. Kuwaiti filmmaker. Born
in 1965 in Kuwait, he studied filmmaking in
New York. Documentaries: A Moment in Time
(1995), Dreams without Sleep (2002), Storm
from the South (2006, 55', Beta SP). Also a narrative feature: Sedra (2000).
43
Alawar, Hamad Mansoor. Emirati filmmaker. He studied computer animation at Miami

International University of Art and Design.
Short animated films: Once upon a Seed (2005,
5', DVD), Hammer and Nails / Matraqa wa
Masamir (2008, 6', Mini DV).
/ Beyrouth, la rencontre / Beirut, al-liqa (1981,

90', 35mm), Khalass (2007, 101', 35mm).
Al-Awar, Maryam. Emirati filmmaker. She

films: Osteoporosis (2004, 1', Mini DV), The
Journey (2005, 13', Mini DV).
Alaywan, Fouad. Lebanese filmmaker. Born

in 1964 in Beirut, he studied at a university in
Montana and has U.S. citizenship. In Beirut he
has made several reports for Future Television.
Fictional shorts: Nostalgia for a Sick Country /
Nostalgie pour un pays malade (1991, 18', Beta
SP), Blue Night, The Wind from Beirut / Le vent
de Beyrouth / Hawa Beirut (2002, 15'), See You
Later / Ila al-leqaa (2006, 25', 35mm).
Alawiya, Borhan. [Known in France as

Borhan Alaoui.] Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1941 in Southern Lebanon, he studied filmmaking from 1968 to 1973 at INSAS in Belgium, where he made two short films, Poster
versus Poster / Afiche contre afiche (1971, 25',
16mm) and a documentary on a Belgian village, Fourrire (1971, 60', 16mm). His first
feature, and best-known film, Kafr Kassem,
which won the top prize, the Tanit dor, at the
Journes Cinmatographiques de Carthage
in Tunis in 1974, was produced by the Syrian
General Cinema Organisation. Throughout
his careereven after his feature debuthe
has continued to make shorter documentaries,
including Letter in a Time of War / Lettre dun
temps de guerre / Risala min zaman al harb
(1984, 55', 35mm), Letter in a Time of Exile /
Lettre du temps de lexil / Risala min zaman almanfa (1985), For the Attention of Madame the
Prime Minister / lattention de Madame le
premier ministre (1982), The Aswan High Dam
/ Assouan, le haut barrage sur le Nil / al-Sad
al-li (1991), To You, Wherever You Are / A toi
o que tu sois / ilayk aynama takoun (2001, 52',
video). He also contributed one episode, The
Eclipse of a Dark Night / Lclipse dune nuit
noire / Fi al-layati al-dam, to the Tunisianproduced collective film After the Gulf? / La
guerre du Golfe ... et aprs / Harbu al-khalj
wa badu? (1992). In 2008, he made a short
fictional film: Mazen and the Ant / Mazen et
la fourmi (2008, 21') in Qatar. Feature films:
Kafr Kassem (in Syria, 1974, 100', 35mm), It
Is Not Enough for God to Be with the Poor / Il
ne suffit pas que Dieu soit avec les pauvres / La
yakfi an yakoun allah maal foukara (1976, 70',
16mm) (documentary), Beirut: The Encounter
Alayan, Muayad Mousa. Palestinian filmmaker. Short films: Qater al-nader (2007, 25'),
Lesh sabreen (2008, 20').
Al-Azzawi, Kamel. Iraqi filmmaker.

Born in 1926, he studied filmmaking and then
worked as assistant director on five films in
Egypt. Director of the film department at the
Baghdad Institute of Fine Arts, he also worked
as an actor and stage director. Short film: Sulayman the Wise / Souleymane le sage / Souleymn al-hakim (1956). His sole feature film,
an intended superproduction, was a financial disaster. Feature film: Nebuchadnezzar
/ Nabuchodonsor / Nabuoched nosser (1962,
35mm).
Al-Badran, Mansour. Saudi filmmaker. Short
film: Anglizi (2008, 8', DV Cam).
Al-Banna, Shoug. Emirati filmmaker. Born
in 1985. Short film: Will the Dream Ever Come
True? (2006, 1', Mini DV).
Al-Basha, Mohamed. Saudi filmmaker. A
writer who has also worked in television. Short
fictional films: Around Us (2006, 18', Mini
DV), Angels without Wings (2007, 4', DVD).
Albatashe, Jasim. Omani filmmaker. He
studied drama and works as television actor
and director. Short film: The Disaster (2007,
20', DV Cam).
Albatashi, Abdullah. Omani filmmaker. Born
in 1977 in Oman, he is a poet, playwright, and
44
television director. Short film: Bint Garba

(2007, 16', DV Cam).
Al-Baw, Darin Ali. Palestinian filmmaker.
Born in 1979, she studied at the American
University in Sharjah. Short documentary
film: Identity (2004, 34', DV Cam).
Al-Bayati, Dia. Iraqi filmmaker: Feature
film: The Al-Ahrar Bridge / Le pont dal-Ahrar
/ Jisr al-Ahrar (1971, 35mm).
Al-Bazi, Baz Shamoun. Iraqi filmmaker. Resident in Canada since 1996. Short films: Desire
and Clay (1997, 30', Super 16), Where Is Iraq?
Where Is Iraq? (2004, 20', Beta SP).
Al-Beik, Ammar. Syrian filmmaker. Also
photographer and video artist. Born in 1972
in Damascus, he began as a photographer before turning to film in 1997. Short films and
documentaries: Harvest of Light / Moisson de
lumire (1997), They Were There / Ils taient l
(2000, 8', Beta SP), 16mm (2001), The Golden
River / Le fleuve dor (2002), Boulevard Assad
(2002), My Ear Can See / Mon oreille peut voir
(2002, 8', Beta SP), When I Colour My Fish /
Quand je colorie mon poisson (2002, 1', DV
Cam), Clapper / Le Clap / Klakeit (2003, 58',
Beta SP), Jerusalem HD (2008, 22'). Featurelength documentaries: I Am the One Who
Brings Flowers to Her Grave / Je suis celle qui
porte les fleurs vers sa tombe (with Hala alAbdallah Yakoub, 2006, 110', video), Samia
(2008, 40', DigiBeta).
Al-Bloshi, Yusef Mohamed. Omani filmmaker. He studied media in Cairo, worked as
a playwright and in television, and also works
for the Ministry of Education. Short films:
Leaves Tears (2005, 40', Mini DV), Warrior
Breathes (2007, 12', DV Cam).
Al-Bloushi, Abdalla Mohamed. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at Abu Dhabi Mens College. Short film: A Gurm (2005, 3', Mini DV).
Al-Braikhi, Shaikha Rashed. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at Abu Dhabi Womens
College. Short films: Bazaar (with Fatema

Salem al-Shabibi and Amani Ahmed al-Lawghani, 2003, 3', DV Cam), Lor torrent (with
Amani Ahmed al-Lawghani, 2004, 1', Mini
DV).
Al-Buloshi, Khadija Hussain. Emirati filmmaker. Born in 1985, she studied at Dubai
Womens College. Short films: Florist (with
Alia al-Shamsi, 2005, 10', Mini DV), Through
Childs Eyes (with Alia al-Shamsi, 2005, 6',
Mini DV), Fly Fly Fly = Die (with Alia alShamsi, 2006, 2', Mini DV), No Vacancy (with
Alia al-Shamsi, 2006, 13', Mini DV).
Al-Buna, Mamoun. Palestinian filmmaker.
Documentary: Martyrs on the Road to Palestine / Les martyrs sur le chemin la Palestine /
Shuhada ala tariq filastin (1975, 7').
Al-Bunni, Maamoun. Syrian filmmaker. He
studied filmmaking at the cole Nationale
Suprieure Louis-Lumire in Paris. He has
since made several short documentary films,
including Dead for Palestine / Morts pour la
Palestine (1973), A Day in a Childs Life / Une
journe de la vie dun enfant, and The Peasant Woman / La paysanne / Al-mara al-rifiya
(1979). He has also worked for Syrian and Gulf
television.
Albzzaz, Abdulla Mohammad Jawad. Bahraini filmmaker. Born in 1983, he studied at
the University of Bahrain. Short films: Till
When? (2004, 16', Mini DV), Tree (2006, 2',
Mini DV), 2008 (2007, 2', Mini DV).
Al-Dabbagh, Noor. Saudi filmmaker. Documentary: Seeing through the Sand (2008, 50').
Aldaheri, Saeed. Emirati filmmaker. Born at
Al-Ain, he studied at Bristol University in the
United Kingdom. Short films: The Final Conflict (2002, 9', video), The Kidnapped (2003,
40', DV Cam), 01'03 (2004, with eleven other
directors, 12', Mini DV), Subarashii (2004, 4',
video), The Parrot, (2004, 6', DV Cam), Snow
(2005, 6', Mini DV), Stain (2005, 6', Mini DV),
The Rescue / al-Fazaa (2008, 18', Mini DV).
Al-Dakheel, Khalid. Saudi filmmaker. Short
animated films: Cats Benefits (2006, 7', DVD),
Sida (2006, 5', DVD).
Al-Daradji, Mohamed. Iraqi filmmaker. Born in 1978 in Baghdad, he studied stage
production at the Baghdad Institute of Fine
Arts and received a technical training in filmmaking at the Media Academy in Hilversum
in the Netherlands. He also studied at Leeds
Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom. He worked as cameraman and then as
director of photography on a dozen shorts,
documentaries, and commercials. He also
made two short films, The War / La guerre
(2003) and The Faith / La foi (2005). His first
feature film was produced with funding from
Dutch and UK sources. Feature films: Dreams
/ Rves / Ahlaam (2005, 110', 35mm), War,
Love, God and Madness / Guerre, amour, dieu,
et folie (2009, 72') (documentary), Son of Babylon / Fils de Babylone / Ibn Babil (2009, 90').
Al-Darmaki, Salma Khaifa. Emirati filmmaker. Short films: Katkoot (with Hermeen
Kamel Adam, 2007, 26', DVD), My Palestine
(2008, 35', Mini DV).
Al-Dawud, Hikmat. Palestinian filmmaker.
Documentary: Forever in Memory / Abadan
fith-thakira (1983).
Al-Deek, Yousef. Palestinian filmmaker.
Documentary: Case (2005).
Aldeen, Baqer Sadiq Zain. Bahraini filmmaker. He studied mass communications at
the University of Bahrain and works as a journalist. Short film: Bahrain Municipal Experience (2006, 21', DV Cam).
Al-Demashqi, Nedhal K. Saudi filmmaker.
He studied in the Czech Republic and in the
United Kingdom and worked on several films
in Europe. Short films: Street Dreamer (2005,
9', DV Cam), Hjab and the Inherited Treasures
(2006, 66', DV Cam).
Al-Dhabaan, Abedel Muhsen. Saudi filmmaker. Short film: Three Men and a Woman
(2009, 13', Mini DV).
45
Al-Dhahery, Hessa Abdulla Rashed. Emirati
filmmaker. She studied at Abu Dhabi Womens College. Short documentary film: Guys
Day Out (2005, 6', DV Cam).
Al-Dhahiri, Ahmed Saeed Ali. Emirati filmmaker. Short film: Be Merciful (2007, 13',
DVD).
Al-Dhahri, Hiba Ahmad. Emirati filmmaker.
film: Melting Candle (2003, 4', Beta SP).
Al-Dhanhani, Heba. Emirati filmmaker. She
studied at Dubai Womens College. Short film:
Adolescent Colors (with Wafa Faisal, Maitha
Ebrahim, Nada Salem, Hana Abdullah Mohammed al-Mulla al-Muhairi, 2005, 28', DV
Cam).
Al-Dibs, Nidal. Syrian filmmaker. Born
in 1960 in Syria, he studied architecture in
Damascus and filmmaking at the VGIK film
school in Moscow. He worked as assistant to
Oussama Mohammad and Abdellatif Abdelhamid. He made several short films: Winter
Sonata / Sonate dhiver (1992), Collage (1994),
Oh Night / O nuit, regard / Ya leil ya ain
(1999, 12', 35mm), Black Stone / Pierre noire /
Hajar aswad (2005, 60'). Feature film: Under
the Ceiling / Sous le toit / Tahta al-saqf (2005,
95', 35mm).
Al-Dijaili, Zuhair. Iraqi filmmaker. Feature film: Mutawa and Bahia / Mutawa et Bahia / Mutawa wa Bahia (with Sahib Haddad,
1982, 35mm).
Al-Din Jassem, Borhan. Iraqi filmmaker. Feature films: The Will of the People
/ La volont du peuple / Iradat al-chab (1959,
35mm), The Path of Love / La voie de lamour
/ Darb al-Hub (1966, 35mm), Baghdad Nights
/ Les nuits de Bagdad / Layali Bagdad (1975,
35mm).
Al-Doseri, Ebrahim Rashid. Bahraini filmmaker. Also a composer, author, and radio
and television writer, he works for the Ministry of Education. Short films: The Cage (2005,
46
17', DVD), A Cord from Al Muharra (2006, 18',

DV Cam), Other Time (2006, 47', DV Cam), A
Flower (2007, 13', DVD), Light Fingers (2007,
12', DVD), Ash of the Years (2008, 12', Mini
DV).
Al-Doseri, Munira. Emirati filmmaker. She
studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short fictional films: A Tail Apart (with
Miriam al-Sabah, 2004, 4', Mini DV), Faithless
(with Miriam al-Sabbah, 2004, 4', Mini DV).
Al-Duwaisan, Faisal S. Kuwaiti filmmaker.
Short musical video: Singing Nemo (2006, 3',
Mini DV).
Aleddin, Ghasoub. Palestinian filmmaker.
Documentary: Escape / Evasion / Hurub
(2004).
Al-Emadi, Ahmed Abdullah. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at Abu Dhabi Mens College. Short films: The Present Completes the
Past (2006, 5', DigiBeta), Coastal Zone in
Dubai (2006, 6', DigiBeta), Dubai Green City
(2006, 13', DigiBeta), Zaabeel Park (2006, 6',
DigiBeta).
Al-Enzi, Meshal Mogamed. Saudi filmmaker.
He studied at the Imam Mohamed Bin Saud
Islamic University and worked as a newspaper journalist and television reporter. Short
fictional films: Taxi (2004, 20', DigiBeta), Democracy Dimocratiya (2006, 5', HDV).
Al-Eyaf, Abdullah. Saudi filmmaker. Born
in 1976 in Al-Hassa in Saudi Arabia, he studied mechanical engineering. He worked as an
engineer before turning to journalism and
the cinema and becoming a film critic for
Al-Watan. Documentaries: Cinema 500 km /
Cinma 500 km (2006, 45', Beta SP), A Frame
/ Etaar (2007, 19', Mini DV), Rain / Matar
(2008, 23', Beta SP).
Al-Falahi, Rashid Harib. Emirati filmmaker.
Short film: Prices Crisis (2007, 9', DVD).
Al-Faqih, Dara. Emirati filmmaker. Short
film: Nour (2007, 6', Mini DV).
Al-Faqih, Rowan. Palestinian filmmaker.

Born in 1974 in Jerusalem, she is one of the
founders of the Palestinian Filmmakers Collective. Her first documentary was a Palestinian-Swiss co-production. Documentary: Summer of 85 (2005). Contributed Security Leak
(2' 48") to the collective film Summer 2006,
Palestine (2006, 35', Beta SP).
Al-Fardan, Khalid. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied at the Abu Dhabi Mens College. Short
film: Between Yesterday and Today (with
Mohamed Najm al-Qubaisi and Mohamed
Abdullah al-Qubaisi, 1998, 2', DV Cam).
Al-Farjani, Amen. Emirati filmmaker. Studied at UAE University. Short film: Migrants in
Their Own Country (2001, 14', Beta SP).
Al-Flasy, Latifa Saeed. Emirati filmmaker.
animated film: A Day in Time (2004, 2', Mini
DV).
Alfounz, Tanjour. Syrian filmmaker. Short
film: Little Sun (2008).
Al-Gargawi, Yasser. Emirati filmmaker. Short
films: Arabias Wildlife Centre (2001, 4', DV
Cam), Superstition between Reality and Fantasy (with Khalid Alrayhi, 2002, 15', Beta SP).
Al-Ghaferi, Samira. Emirati filmmaker. Born
in 1975 in Abu Dhabi, she studied at the University of Al-Ain, UAE. Short films: Zionism
Campaign (with Bassam Mesalatie, 2006, 22',
HD), For the Sake of Democracy (with Bassam
Mesalatie, 2007, 5', HD), For Release (with Bassam Mesalatie, 2007, 5', HD), Small Terrorists
(with Bassam Mesalatie, 2007, 7', HD).
Alghamdi, Bandar. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied at the University of Sharjah. Short
film: Smoking Rose (2006, 2', Mini DV).
Al-Ghanem, Nujoom. Emirati filmmaker. Born in Dubai, she is also a poet, with six
published collections of poems. She worked as
a journalist and studied media production at
Ohio University and at Griffith University in
Australia. She has undertaken various media
activities in the Emirates. Two short fictional
films: Ice-Cream / La glace (1997, 7', Beta SP)
and The Park / Le parc (1997, 12', Beta SP), and
a documentary: Between Two Banks / Entre
deux rives (1999, 20', Beta SP). Feature-length
documentary: Al-Mureed (2008, 87', DigiBeta).
Al-Gheilan, Gamal. Bahraini filmmaker.
Short film: Yassin (2009, 25', HD Cam).
Al-Ghoussayni, Samir. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in 1948 in Baakline, he began his
career as script boy and as assistant director
to Taysir Abboud. Following the success of his
first feature, he made some twenty-four commercial feature films between 1972 and 1994,
some co-produced with Syria. Feature films:
The She-Cats of Hamra Street / Les chattes de
la rue Hamra / Kotat char al-Hamra (1972,
35mm), The Captive / La captive / al-Asira (1973,
35mm), Cherwale and Mini-skirt / Cherwale
et mini-jupe / Cherwale wa mini-jupe (1973,
35mm), The Postman / Le facteur / Said albarid (1973, 35mm), Grand Prix / Grand prix /
al-Jaiza al koubra (1974, 35mm), Winter Women / Femmes dhiver / Nisaa lil chitaa (1974,
35mm), Life Is a Melody / La vie est une mlodie / al-Dounya nagham (1975, 35mm), Does
/ Biches / Ghezlane (1976), Days in London /
Des jours Londres / Ayyam fi London (1977,
35mm), Fish Filet / Filet de poisson / Samak
bila hassak (1977, 35mm), A Beauty and Some
Giants / Une belle et des gants / Hassnaa wa
amalika (1980, 35mm), The Adventurers / Les
aventuriers / al-Moughamiron (1981, 35mm),
Women in Danger / Des femmes en danger /
Nisaa fi khatar (1981, 35mm), The Island Devil
/ Le diable de lle / Chaitane al-jazira (1981,
35mm), The Affair / Laffaire / al-Safaka (1982,
35mm), Womens Intrigue / La manigance des
femmes / Loubat al-nisaa (1982, 35mm), The
Heros Return / Le retour du hros / Awdat
al-batal (1983, 35mm), The Siren / La sirne /
Arouss al-bahr (1984, 35mm), The Gipsy and
the Heroes / La gitane et les hros / al-Ghajaria
wal abtal (1985, 35mm), The Seductress and the
Adventurer / La sductrice et laventurier / alFatina wal moughamer (1985, 35mm), Fadous
and the Hitchhiker / Fadous et lautostoppeuse
(1989, 35mm), Uncle Vania & Co.s Circus / Le
47
cirque de loncle Vania et cie / Cirque al-ame
Vania wa chourakah (1991, 35mm), Mr. Gold /
Monsieur Gold / Mr. Gold (1993, 35mm), Operation: Golden Phoenix / Opration: Golden
Phenix / Amaliat al-taer al-zahabi (1994,
35mm).
Alhabbash, Ismail. Palestinian filmmaker.
Documentary: The New Apartment / ashShakkato-l-jadeeda (2002).
Alhaddad, Fathia. Kuwaiti filmmaker. She
studied in France and works as writer and
journalist. Short film: 40 Years After the Storm
(2006, 21', Mini DV).
Al-Haddad, Mohamed Fouad. Emirati filmmaker. Short fictional film: The Rain (2002,
16', video).
Al-Haj, Ahmad Ali. Emirati filmmaker. Short
documentary films: Falconry and the CITES
Treaty (2002, 6', Beta SP), The Ostrich (2003,
7', DV Cam).
Al-Hajri, Saeed. Emirati filmmaker. Studied
at the Dubai Mens College. Short documentary film: 3adi.com (2000, 22', DV Cam).
Al-Halami, Sultan. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short fictional film: Victims (with Saoud
Alkaabi, 2007, 1', Mini DV).
Al-Halibi, Hassan. Bahraini filmmaker.
Feature film: Four Girls / Quatre filles (2008,
144').
Al-Hamad, Salama. Emirati filmmaker.
Short fictional film: Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow (2001, 4', DV Cam).
Al-Hamadi, Ali. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at Abu Dhabi Mens College. Short films:
Proud of My Heritage (1999, 4', DV Cam),
Electronic Chat (2000, 13', DV Cam), Learning
without Borders (2001, 1', DV Cam).
Al-Hamli, Reem. Emirati filmmaker. She
48
animated film: Error Message: Access Denied

(2005, 4', Mini DV).
Al-Hamly, Aisha. Emirati filmmaker. She
films: A Cats Life (2000, 3', DV Cam), Omani
Fashion (2000, 2', DV Cam), Dr. Martin (2001,
6', DV Cam).
Al-Hammadi, Abdulla Ahmed. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at Dubai Mens College.
Short film: Animal Rights (2006, 1', Mini DV).
Al-Hammadi, Hamad. Emirati filmmaker.
Short fictional film: Ashes / Ramad (2007, 10',
Mini DV).
Al-Hammadi, Khadeeja Mohammed. Emirati filmmaker. Born in 1982 in Abu Dhabi, she
studied at the Abu Dhabi Womens College.
Short films: Sunshine Tours (2001, 1', Beta SP),
The Doomed (2003, 8', DV Cam).
Al-Hammadi, Khalid Ahmed. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at UAE University. Short
films: What Is After the Explosion? (with
Maryam Bin Fahad, 2004, 39', DV Cam), High
Peak and Pure Intent (2005, 3', DV Cam), Him
(2005, 25', DV Cam).
Al-Hammadi, Mariam Dawood. Emirati
filmmaker. Born in 1982 in Abu Dhabi, she
studied at Zayed University. Short films: A
Moment (2004, 1', Mini DV), To Where! (2005,
4', Mini DV), Sir Bani Yas (2005, 5', Mini DV),
E (2005, 1', Mini DV).
Al-Hammadi, Rana Mohamed. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at the Abu Dhabi Womens
College. Short film: A Point of No Return (with
Eiman Ahmed Ghanem and Dana Ali al-Hosani, 2003, 2', DV Cam).
Al-Hammady, Mohamed Abdullah. Emirati
filmmaker. Born in 1988, he is also an actor
and dramatist. Short films: Houjas (2007, 20',
HDV), Mariams Paradise (2008, 18', Digi
Beta).
Al-Hani, Hassanain. Iraqi filmmaker. He

studied at the Independent Film & TV College in Baghdad. Short documentary film: A
Stranger in His Own Country (2007, 10').
Al-Hashemi, Abeer. Emirati filmmaker. She
studied at Dubai Womens College, Short
films: A Shock of Life (2005, 8', Mini DV), One
Drop (2005, 1', Mini DV), Less Is More (2006,
1', DV Cam).
Al-Hashemi, Buthaina. Emirati filmmaker.
films: A Spinster Miss (2002, 8', Beta SP), Poverty in the UAE (with Amena Saif al-Suboosi
and Mariam Jassim al-Sarkal, 2002, 6', Beta
SP).
Al-Hashimi, Tariq. Emirati filmmaker. Born
in 1987, he studied at Dubai Mens College.
Short films: Brotherhood Takes a Friend or
Two (with Waleed Masood Badri, 2006, 3',
Mini DV), Speeding Kills (2008, 3', Mini DV).
Al-Hassan, Areej. Emirati filmmaker. Short
film: Child Labor (with Farah Kassem, 2007,
1', Mini DV).
Al-Hassan, Azza. Palestinian filmmaker.
Born in 1971 in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian parents who moved to Beirut when she was
born and back to Amman when the Israelis
invaded Lebanon in 1982. Her father was one
of the leaders of Fatah. She studied film and
sociology in Glasgow and television documentary at Goldsmiths College, London. She has
worked for Arab satellite televison stations,
travelling between London, Jordan, Dubai,
and Ramallah. Documentaries: Arab Women
Speak Out / Des femmes arabes parlent / alArabiyyat yatakallimna (1996, 40', Beta SP),
Title Deeds from Moses / Un acte de Mose /
Kushan Musa / Kushan musa (1999, 29', Beta
SP), Sindbad Is a She (1999, 30', Beta SP), The
Place / La place / al-Makan (2000, 7', Beta SP),
Newstime / Lheure des nouvelles / Zaman alakhbar (2001, 52', Beta SP), 3cm Less / 3cm de
moins / Talata sintimetar (2003, 60', Beta SP),
Kings and Extras: Digging for a Palestinian
49
Image / Des rois et des figurants / Muluk wa

kumbars (2004, 62', Beta SP), Forgotten Images
/ Sowar manisiyah (2004).
directed music videos and teaches at Kuwait

University. Short fictional film: Just Like You
Imagined (2004, 10', 35mm).
Alhebsi, Abeer. Emirati filmmaker, Studied at

the UAE University. Short animated films: The
Hypothetical Learning (2004, 2', DVD), Brief
About Japan (2004, 2', DVD).
Ali, Emad. Iraqi filmmaker. He studied at the

Independent Film and Television Academy in
Baghdad. Documentary: A Candle for the Shabandar Cafe (2007, 23').
Al-Helou, Raed. Palestinian filmmaker.

Worked as a cameraman in Rammallah.
Documentaries: Gaza Tea Boy / Bai al-shay
fi Ghazza (1997), Local / Mahalli (with Imad
Ahmed and Ismal Habash, 2002), Hopefully
for the Best / Pour le meilleur, esprons / Laalo
khayr (2004, 42', video).
Ali, Hafiz Ali. Qatari filmmaker. He studied

at the California Arts Institute and Chapman
University. He has directed TV shows in the
United States and Qatar. Short film: Cab Driver (2005, 19', 16mm).
Al-Hindi, Abdel Wahab. Jordanian

filmmaker, born in Palestine. Feature films:
The Road to Jerusalem / La route de Jrusalem /
al-Tarikila al-Qods (1969), Struggle till Liberation / Lutte jusqu la libration / Kifah hatta
al-Tahrir (1969).
Al-Homoud, Bader Abdul Majeed. Saudi
filmmaker. Short film: Pigeon of War (2006,
24', Mini DV).
Al-Hosani, Dana Ali. Emirati filmmaker.
She studied at the Abu Dhabi Womens College. Short film: A Point of No Return (with
Eiman Ahmed Ghanem and Rana Mohamed
al-Hammadi, 2003, 2', DV Cam).
Al-Hulaybi, Hussain Abbas. Bahraini filmmaker. Born in 1977 in Bahrain, he studied
mass media and public relations. He is also a
stage director. Short film: Black Day (2004, 12',
DV Cam).
Alhuraiz, Mohammad. Emirati filmmaker,
He studied at Dubai Mens College. Short animated films: Karth-O-ManiaOne (2004, 3',
Mini DV), Its Truffle Season My Boy! (2005,
5', DV Cam).
Alhusaini, Zeyed (Z.). Kuwaiti filmmaker.
He has lived in Kuwait, Spain, and the United
States and studied at Arizona State University
and Columbia University Film School. He has
Ali, Hussein Hasan. Iraqi filmmaker.

Born in 1974 in Duhok in Kurdish Iraq, he
has made three short fictional films. He also
acted in a dozen tlfilms for Iraqi television.
His co-directed first feature was produced by
a French-based company. Feature film: Narcissus Blossom / Le temps des narcisses / U nergiz
biskvin (with Massoud Arif Salih, 2005, 80',
35mm).
Ali, JafAr. Iraqi filmmaker. Born in 1933,
he studied filmmaking in Iowa, taught at the
Baghdad Fine Art Academy, and founded a
theatre group. Feature films: The Bus Driver
/ Le contrleur dautobus / al-Jabi (1969, 55',
35mm), The Turning / Le tournant a.k.a. Le
virage / al-Monataf (1974, 100', 35mm), The
Bride from Kurdistan / La marie du Kurdistan
/ Arusat Kurdistan (1992).
Ali, Khalid. Emirati filmmaker. Short films:
The Last Call (1998, 16', S-VHS), Sharks and
Divers (2001, 26', Beta SP).
Ali, Mahdi Ali. Qatari filmmaker. He studied
engineering in Qatar. Short film: Affiliation
(with Mahmoud Salem Ba Ajajah and Dalia
Bakhet, 2007, 9', Mini DV).
Ali, Majeed Radhi. Bahraini filmmaker.
Short fictional film: Resident Evil (2006, 7',
Mini DV).
Ali, Reem. Syrian filmmaker. He studied at
the Institute of Drama and Theatre in Da-
50
mascus. Short fictional film: Zabad (2008, 42',

video).
length documentary: The Roof / Le toit / alSateh (2008, 63', video).
Ali, Safa Mohamed. Iraqi filmmaker. Feature

films: The Last Decision / La dernire dcision
/ Hobat al-madlum (1961, 35mm), Sultana
(1962, 35mm), Gazala (1967, 35mm).
Al-Janabi, Fawzi. Iraqi filmmaker. Feature film: For the Homeland / Pour la patrie /
Min ajl al-watan (1962, 35mm), The Seekers /
Les chercheurs / al-Bahithun (1978).
Ali, Sheefa Abdulla. Emirati filmmaker. She

films: Crazy (Women) Drivers (2002, 3', DV
Cam), The Lie (2003, 6', DV Cam), Letter to
God (2003, 7', DV Cam), Dad, Stay with Me
(2004, 4', DV Cam).
Al-Janabi, Kutaba. Iraqi filmmaker. Born

in Baghdad, he now lives in London, where
he works for MBC television. After studying
filmmaking in Budapest in the 1980s, he made
firstly fictional shorts: Still Life / Nature morte
(1997, 12', 16mm), No Mans Land (1998, 5',
color), The Train / Le train (1999, 9', Beta SP),
Transient (2003, 5', DV Cam), Documentaries:
My Friend Nassir (2003, 7', DV Cam), Against
the Light (2007, 15').
Alibrahim, Faisal. Kuwaiti filmmaker. Born

in 1978 in Kuwait. He studied film at California State University. Short film: Karma (2007,
10', HD).
Al-Imam, Borhan Jassem. Iraqi filmmaker.
Feature film: Chazhra the Bedouin / Chazhra la bdouine / Chazhra al-badawia (1962,
35mm).
Alireza, Hani. Emirati filmmaker. Short film:
September 12th (with Theyab al-Tamimi, 2005,
11', Mini DV).
Al-Jabri, Adel. Emirati filmmaker. Short
films: Smoking Kills Too (2007, 2', Mini DV),
Reuse, Recycle (2007, 2', Mini DV), Speeding
Kills (2008, 3', Mini DV).
Al-Jabri, Hamad. Emirati filmmaker. Short
experimental films: Path (2004, 2', DV Cam),
Nothing (2004, 45', DV Cam), Loneliness
(2005, 6', Mini DV), Voice of the Rocks (2005,
3', Mini DV).
Al-Jader, Sami. Iraqi filmmaker. Feature
film: The Path of Evil / La voie du mal / Trik
al-char (1967, 35mm).
Al-Jafari, Kamal. Palestinian filmmaker. Born in 1972 in Ramala, Palestine, he
graduated from the Academy of Media Arts in
Cologne. Short films: The Jahalin / al-Jahalin
(2000), Visit Iraq (2003, 25', 35mm). Feature-
Al-Janabi, Mohamed Youssef. Iraqi

filmmaker. Feature film: The Searchers / Les
chercheurs / Al-bahitun (1978, 35mm).
Al-Janahi, Nawaf. Emirati filmmaker. Born
in 1977 in Abu Dhabi, he studied film in the
United States, where he made three Super 8
films: The Source, My Love, The Confrontation (all 1998). He has worked for Abu Dhabi
television and as cameraman on a number of
shorts. Short fictional films: Obsession (2002,
18', Mini DV), On a Road (2003, 4', Mini DV),
Souls (2006, 15', Beta SP), Mirrors of Silence /
Miroirs du silence / Maraya al-samt (2006, 16',
Beta SP).
Al-Jassim, Mohammad. Emirati filmmaker.
Short film: Life of Stock Market (2007, 12', Mini
DV).
Al-Jermi, Hiba Saleh. Emirati filmmaker. She
studied mass communcation at UAE University. Short documentary film: Al-Gars (with
Fatima al-Ziyoudi, 2007, 5', DVD).
Al-Jisr, Rachad. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1965 in London. Studied architecture in Florence and became a photographer. Short films:
Sweet Little Sister, Distant Shadows / Ombres
lointaines (with Akram Zaatari, 1993, 11', Beta
SP).
Al-Joundi, Dima. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1966 in Arnoun, Lebanon, she studied philosophy in Beirut until 1984, when she began
her studies of filmmaking at INSAS in Brussels. She worked in a variety of production
roles, worked for Young Asia TV, and made
reports and documentaries for television. After a year in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where she
produced documentaries, she returned to
Beirut. There she organized film festivals and
became the first woman to produce and distribute films through her company, Crystal
Films, producing, among others, Nigol Bezjians feature, Ayroum (2005). Documentaries:
Between Us Two ... Beirut / Entre nous deux
. . . Beyrouth / Bayni wa baynak . . . Bayrut
(1993, 52', 16mm), The Silk Route in Anatolia / La route de la soie en Anatolie (1995, 52',
35mm), The Mask of the Night / Le masque de
la nuit (1996, 20', Beta), Maid for Sale / Bonne
vendre (2005, 53', video).
Al-Junaibi, Abdullah Moumen. Emirati
filmmaker. Short fictional films: When? (2002,
8', Beta SP), Sunset (2002, 51', DCV Cam).
Al-Junaibi, Afrah. Emirati filmmaker. Short
documentary film: Conflict of Suffering (2008,
5', video).
Al-Juneidi, Laith. Palestinian filmmaker. He
studied visual culture at Coventry University
in the United Kingdom. His student films include a short fictional film: Trainspoofing, and
two documentaries: Church@21stCentury and
War vs. Peace (2001, 12', Mini DV).
Al-Kaabi, Abdulla Matar. Emirati filmmaker. Born in Fujairah, he studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short film: A Stutdent Film That Never Happened (2006, 9', Mini
DV).
Alkaabi, Saoud. Emirati filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Victims (with Sultan al-Halami,
2007, 1', Mini DV).
Alkalbani, Khalid Salem. Omani filmmaker.
Short fictional films: The Bus (2006, 7', DV
Cam), Whiteness (2009, 9', HD Cam).
51
Al-Karimi, Nada Mohamed. Emirati filmmaker. She studied communication science in
Dubai. Her first short won a prize at the Beirut
Documentary Film Festival. Documentary:
Death by Pleasure / La mort par plaisir / alMaout lel motaa (2004, 10', Beta SP).
Alkarimi, Nadia Mohamed. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at Dubai Womens College. Short documentary films: Emirati Hijab
in Emirati Eyes (2004, 10', Mini DV), Dying for
Fun (2005, 10', Mini DV).
Al-Katheeri, Ali Hassan. Emirati filmmaker.
Short fictional film: The Honour of Land (2005,
7', DV Cam).
Al-Katheery, Howaida Ali. Emirati filmmaker. Studied at Abu Dhabi Womens College. Short films: Farewell (1999, 4', DV Cam),
Cultural Foundation (2000, 1', DV Cam), The
Yemeni Diaspora (2001, 5', DV Cam).
Alkawey, Maroun. Syrian filmmaker.
Feature film: The Heroic Airforce Formations
/ Les hroiques formations ariennes / Kharq
el-akhtr (1974, 35mm).
Al-Keisri, Sabah. Emirati filmmaker. Studied
at UAE University. Short film: Oud Fragrance
(2000, 11', Beta SP).
Alketbi, Fatima Saif. Emirati filmmaker.
Short documentary film: Lost Identity, (2007,
23', DVD).
Al-Khaja, Khahida. Emirati filmmaker. She
films: The Old Days (2003, 8', Beta SP), Jinni:
Fact or Fiction? (2004, 10', Mini DV).
AL-KHAJA, MAHER. Emirati filmmaker.
Feature film: The Fifth Chamber Ouija / La
cinquime chambre dOuija (2009, 128', HD
Cam).
Al-Khaja, Nayla. Emirati filmmaker. She
studied mass communication at Dubai Womens College and at Ryerson University, Toronto, and set up her own production com-
52
pany in Dubai. Student films: Red (2002), Free

Me Cockroach (2003). Short films: Unveiling
Dubai (2004, 46', DigiBeta), Arabana (2006, 6',
35mm).
Al-Khaja, Reef. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at Abu Dhabi Womens College. Short films,
one documentary: Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra (with Ameena Abdulla al-Mazrouie,
2003, 11', DV Cam), and two fictional: Rebirth
(2004, 7', DV Cam), People (2004, 7', DV Cam).
Al-Khajah, Farid. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short films: Happy People (2005, 7', Mini
DV), Digital Predestination (2007, 11', DVD),
The Last Bahraini (2007, 6', HDV), The Hadith
in Contemporary Times (2008, 32', HD).
Al-Khaldi, Susan. Emirati filmmaker. She
documentary film: The Golden Mask: The Burgah (1999, 5', DV Cam).
Al-Khalifi, Abdulrahman. Kuwaiti filmmaker. Short fictional films: The Lost Years (2008,
17', Mini DV), Whispers of Sin (2009, 31', HD
Cam).
Al-Khatib, Basil. Palestinian filmmaker.
Documentaries: Amina ... A Palestinian Story
/ Amina ... une histoire palestinienne / Amina
. . . Hikaya filstiniyyah (1982), Curse / Lana
(1984).
Al-Khatib, Dhafir. Iraqi filmmaker. Documentary: Who Are They Flying the Flags For?
/ Pour qui hisse-ton les drapeaux (1994, 20',
16mm).
Al-Khatib, Nabil Issa. Palestinian filmmaker.
Documentary: Return of the Deer / Le retour
des gazelles / Awdat al-ghazala (2003).
Al-Khatib, Sahar. Emirati filmmaker. Studied communication technology at Dubai Wo
mens College. Short film: Im a Man / Ana rajol (with Shamma Abu Nawas, 2006, 19', Mini
DV).
Al-Khayali, Abderrahman. Syrian

filmmaker. Feature film: Three Operations in
Palestine / Trois Oprations en Palestine / Thalath amaliyyatdkhil Filistin (with Mohamed
Salah, 1969, 90', 35mm).
Al-Khayat, Yasser. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied at Dubai Mens College. Short film:
Friendship (2008, 1', DVD).
Al-Khoori, Khawla Zainal. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at Abu Dhabi Womens
College. Short films: Fatherhood (2002, 3', DV
Cam), A Hard Lesson (2002, 3', DV Cam), Dinner Invitation (2003, 5', DV Cam), Al-Msafer
(2003, 6', DV Cam).
Al-Khoori, Thuraya. Emirati filmmaker.
Born in 1980, she studied at Abu Dhabi Womens College. Short films: Persian Carpet (2001,
8', DV Cam), Boss (2001, 1', DV Cam), Sooner
or Later? (2002, 6', DV Cam).
Al-Khouri, Alia. Emirati filmmaker. She
studied at the Abu Dhabi Womens College.
Short documentary film: Always in Mind
(2000, 4', DV Cam).
Al-Kiyumi, Dawood. Omani filmmaker.
Short film: Realism Beats / al-Eqaya afthal
(with Yasir al-Kiyumi, 2007, 1', DigiBeta).
Al-Kiyumi, Yasir. Omani filmmaker. Short
film: Realism Beats / al-Eqaya afthal (with Dawood al-Kiyumi, 2007, 1', DigiBeta).
Al-Kout, Meqdad. Kuwaiti filmmaker. Also
actor and assistant on commercials. Short
films: Shards of Peace (2006), The Beauty of
Khaleds Mind (2007, 12', HD), Paradoxes /
Mufaraqat (2008, 24', DigiBeta).
Alkubaisi, Meshaal Ali. Qatari filmmaker.
He has worked for Qatar TV and Al Jazeera.
Short documentary film: Jusasiyah (2006, 7',
Mini DV).
Alkury, Dalia. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. Born in 1980, of Jordanian/Palestinian
origins and Canadian nationality. She studied at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada,
and at Goldsmiths College in London. Short
documentary films: Its MY Grapevine (2003),
Made in China (2004, 3', DV Cam), Arab Terrorist Management Camp (2004), Like Many
of Us, Nayef Has a Mobile (2004), Smile Youre
in South Lebanon / Souriez vous tes au Sud
Liban (2008, 53', video).
Al-Lawghani, Amani Ahmed. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at Abu Dhabi Womens
College. Short films: Bazaar (with Fatema Salem al-Shabibi and Shaikha Rashed al-Braikhi,
2003, 3', DV Cam), Lor torrent (with Shaikha
Rashed al-Braikhi, 2004, 1', Mini DV).
Al-Leem, Juma Hmaid. Emirati filmmaker.
Short documentary films: The Dream Has
Come True (2002, 9', Beta SP), Economic Crime
in a Time of Globalism (2002, 9', Beta SP).
Allooh, Mohamed. Emirati filmmaker. Short
documentary film: Confessions of Muhauras
Idiot (2002, 33', Beta SP).
Al-Mahled, Khaldoun. Syrian filmmaker. Feature film: Good Night / Bonne nuit
(1975, 35mm).
Al-Mahmoud, Khalid. Emirati filmmaker.
Born in 1976 in Abu Dhabi, he studied mass
communications at Denver University in the
United States and filmmaking at the New York
Film Academy. He now lives and works in the
Emirates. Cameraman on a number of shorts.
Short films: Business and Personal (1999),
Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2001, 4', 16mm),
Dream in a Box (2003, 6', DV Cam), Breakfast
(2004, 1', Mini DV), 01'03 (with eleven other
directors, 2004, 12', Mini DV), The Barber
(2005, 16', Mini DV), Celebration of Life (2005,
5', Mini DV), A Fictional Story: Woman and
Boy (2007, 5', Mini DV), Bint al-Nokhitha
(2008, 17', DigiBeta).
Almahmoud, Khalid. Qatari filmmaker.
Born in Qatar, he works as a broadcast journalist for the Al Jazeera network. He studied
filmmaking at the London Film Academy and
53
has also written plays and published poetry.
Short film: Terrorism-Tourism / Irhab-seyaha
(2008, 3', DigiBeta).
Al-Mahrouqi, Khaled Saleem. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at Dubai Mens College.
Short films: Whispers (2005, 5', Mini DV), Fatal Flaw (2005, 6', Mini DV).
Al-Majid, Basheer. Iraqi filmmaker. Born
in 1977 in Iraq, he is director, actor, writer,
poet, and journalist and teaches at the Faculty
of Fine Arts in Baghdad. He starred in Mohamed al-Daradjis feature film Dreams. Short
fictional film: Personal Calendar / Taqweem
shakhsi (2007, 9', DV Cam).
Al-Maleh, Nabil. Syrian filmmaker. Born
in 1939 in Damascus, he began his career as a
caricaturist and painter. He travelled widely in
Europe and studied filmmaking at FAMU in
Prague. His diploma film, Aleppo / Halab, won
a prize at the Karlovy-Vary Festival. He made
numerous short documentaries and fictional
films: Colour and Life / Couleur et vie / Lawn
wa hayt (1966), Damascan Rhythm / Rythme
damascne / Iqaa Dimashq (1970), Napalm
(1970, 90"), Days of History / Jours dhistoire
/ Aiyyam li al-tarikh (1971), The Eternal Game
/ Le jeu ternel / al-Luaba abadia (1972), The
Rock / Le roc / al-Sakher (1978, 17'), The Circle
/ Le cercle (1978), The Window / La fentre /
al-Nfidha (1978), Images That Remain / Des
images qui restent (1978, 35mm), as well as
the fictional short The Crown of Thorns / La
couronne dpines / Ikil al-shuk (1968, 18'). He
contributed one of three episodes, Childbirth
/ Laccouchement / al-Makhad, to the first feature produced by the General Organisation
for Cinema: Men Under the Sun / Des hommes
sous le soleil / al-Sayyid al-taqaddumi (with
Mohamed Shahin and Mohamed Muwaddin,
1970, 108', 35mm). His private-sector James
Bond parody was made with the popular comedian, actor, and director Doureid Lahham.
He left Syria in the 1980s, teaching in Texas
and at UCLA, before moving to Europe, There
he lived in Geneva and in Athens, where he
made his feature-length documentary. He returned to Damascus to make his fifth feature,
54
The Extras, and a further, unreleased, feature, The Hunt Feast, in 2004. Feature films:
The Leopard / Le lopard / al-Fahd (1972, 110',
35mm), The Progressive / Le Progressiste / alSayyid al-taqaddumi (1974, 35mm), Jealous
James Bond / James Bond le jaloux / Ghawar
James Bond (1974, 35mm), Fragments of Images / Fragments dimages / Baqaya suwar (1980,
128', 35mm), Story of a Dream / Histoire dun
rve / Tarick hulm (1983), The Extras / Les figurants / al-Kombars (1993, 105', 35mm).
Al-Mandeel, Bandar. Emirati filmmaker.
Short film: Dont Drink and Drive (with Heba
Abdulkhalek, 2000, 1', Mini DV).
Al-Mansoor, Asma. Emirati filmmaker. Short
film: My Future Career (with Noura al-Mehairi, 2005, 3', Beta SP).
Al-Mansoori, Mariam Abdulla. Emirati
filmmaker. Born in 1980, she studied at Abu
Dhabi Womens College. Short films: Local
Women Horseriders (2001, 9', DV Cam), Smoggles (2001, 1', DV Cam), What Happened to
Our Men? (2002, 5', DV Cam).
Al-Mansour, Haifaa. Saudi filmmaker. Born
in Saudi Arabia, she studied first English literature at the American University in Cairo and
then management and human resources at the
University of Minnesota. Short films: Who?
/ Qui? (2003, 7', Mini DV), The Bitter Departure / Le dpart amer (2003), Crossed Reflections / Rflexions croises (2004, 15', Beta SP),
The Only Way Out (2004, 15', 16mm), Women
without Shadows / Femmes sans ombre (2005,
45', Beta SP).
Al-Mansour, Khairiya. Iraqi filmmaker. Born in 1958 in Baghdad, she studied first
at the Academy of Arts in Baghdad and then
at the Cairo Higher Film Institute. She worked
as assistant to leading Egyptian directors, including Salah Abou Seif, Tewfiq Saleh, and
Youssef Chahine, before returning to Iraq to
direct documentaries: This Is My Village / Cest
mon village (1981, 15', 35mm), Basma (1981,
10', 16mm), Determination (1983, 12', 35mm),
three 15-minute documentaries about the Nairobi World Conference on Women (1983), The
Daughter of Mesopotamia (1984), The Student
and the Battle (1986, 30', 35mm), The Churches
of Iraq (1988, 30', 35mm), The Wells of Iraq
(1988, 30', 35mm), Magical Fingers (1989, 15',
35mm), The Lady of Ages (1990, 30', 35mm),
Look! (1991, 30', 35mm), White Dreams (1991,
30', 35mm), The Call of Iraq (1991, 30', 35mm),
The Builders (1996, 30', 35mm), Cinema Lover
(1997, 10', 35mm), The Dream, The Memory
(1998, 15', 35mm), One Day in Baghdad (1998,
15', 35mm), The Memory of An Eye (1999, 15',
35mm), Adoration and Creativity (2000, 30',
35mm), Angels Do Not Die (2000, 22', 35mm),
The Last Painting (2000, 7', 35mm). Feature
films: 20/20 Vision / Sitta ala sitta (1988, 90',
35mm), 100 Percent / Miya ala miya (1992,
105', 35mm).
Al-Mansouri, Nayef. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied at Abu Dhabi Mens College. Short
documentary film: Facing the Inevitable (with
Abdallah Bastaki, 2005, 25', Mini DV).
Al-Marri, Rashid. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied at Dubai Mens College. Short films:
Speed Kills (2006, 1', Mini DV), Dubai Mens
College Then and Now (2007, 19', HD), The
Mandoobs (2008, 17', HD).
Al-Marri, Roudha. Emirati filmmaker. She
films: Violence against Women (2005, 1', Mini
DV), The Mannequin (2005, 7', Mini DV).
Al-Marzouqi, Amena Abdul Aziz. Emirati
filmmaker. She studied at Abu Dhabi Womens College. Short documentary films: Wasta:
Above the Law (2002, 3', DV Cam), The War
through Childrens Eyes (2003, 5', DV Cam),
The Wing of Mercy (2003, 5', DV Cam).
Almarzouqi, Hind Mohammed. Emirati
filmmaker. She studied at Abu Dhabi Womens College and subsequently worked in television. Student films: A Day in a Reporters Life
(2000, 5', DV Cam), National Day (2000, 3', DV
Cam), Experience in Life (2000, 3', DV Cam),
55
Behind Closed Doors (2000, 12', Beta SP), AlLiwa (2001, 9', DV Cam), The Showjumper
(2001, 5', DV Cam).
Hassan Ibrahim Hassan Ismail, 2007, 4', Mini

DV), Enough (2007, 2', Mini DV), Discrimination (2007, 14', Mini DV).
Al-Marzouqi, Salah Mohamed. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at the Abu Dhabi Mens
College and later worked as editor and graphics consultant. Student films: Orange (2002, 3',
Beta SP), Sultan al-Nbata Adventures (2003, 9',
video), My Brothers (2003, 22', Beta SP). Short
films: The Arrest Night of al-Nbata (2005, 13',
Mini DV, animation), Tekra (2005, 4', DV
Cam), Soul Colours (2006, 4', DV Cam).
Al-Mazrouei, Afra. Emirati filmmaker. She

film: Traditional Dances in the UAE: Al-Harbia (with Salama al-Romaithi, 2004, 10', Mini
DV).
Al-Marzouqi, Samir Hussain. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at Dubai Mens College.

Short films: A Money Trip (2005, 13', Mini
DV), Higher Colleges of Technology Student
Council (2005, 6', Mini DV).
Al-Mashni, Mahmoud Yousouf. Emirati
filmmaker. He is a member of the Arabic Animation Society in Cairo. Short animated films:
Mercy within Us (2001, 3', Beta SP), I Grow
(2001, 4', Beta SP), Words We Love (2001, 3',
Beta SP), My Grandfather (with Omar Sabah,
2001, 4', Beta SP), Uncle Salems Farm (2001,
12', Beta SP), My Mother (2002, 3', Beta SP), A
Home Near Jerusalem (2002, 3', Beta SP), Our
Beautiful Woods (2002, 11', Beta SP), My Rights
(with Omar Kawan, 2003, 4', DV Cam).
Al-Masri, Izzidin. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short film: Rainbow Dress / Thawb al-qaws
quzah (2004).
Al-Massoudi, Saad. Iraqi filmmaker. He has
worked as a journalist and film critic and
made several films for Iraqi television. Documentary: al-Mandayoun (1998, 51', video).
Al-Mayahi, Asad Salem. Emirati filmmaker.
He studied at Abu Dhabi Mens College. Short
documentary film: Al-Ain City (2003, 5', Beta
SP).
Al-Mazrooie, Ahmed Rashed. Emirati filmmaker. Born in 1984, he studied at Dubai
Mens College. Short film: Ashes to Ashes (with
Al-Mazrouie, Ameena Abdulla. Emirati filmmaker. Born in 1982, she studied at Abu Dhabi
Womens College. Short films: Kids Smoking
(2002, 6', DV Cam), Does Technology Control
the World? (2003, 2', DV Cam), The Well (2003,
8', DV Cam), Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra (with Reef al-Khaja, 2003, 11', DV Cam),
Ayaam (2004, 6', DV Cam).
Al-Medfa, Sahar. Emirati filmmaker. Short
film: The Pebble (2007, 5', DVD).
Al-Mehairi, Noura. Emirati filmmaker. Short
film: My Future Career (with Asma al-Mansoor, 2005, 3', Beta SP).
Almehdi, Zainab. Emirati filmmaker. Born in
1986 in the United States, she studied at the
American University of Sharjah. Short fictional film: Get Real (2006, 6', Mini DV).
Al-Mehrizi, Badria Mohammed. Emirati
filmmaker. She studied at Dubai Womens
College. Short films: Stop Drugs (2001, 8', Beta
SP), Seatbelts Will Save Your Life (with Mariam Jassim al-Sarkal and Shaikha al-Manouri,
2002, 9', Beta SP), Child Abuse (2003, 5', Beta
SP), Falcon Hunting (2003, 10', Beta SP).
Al-Meraikly, Khalifa. Qatari filmmaker. Feature film: Threads Beneath Sands
/ Des fils sous le sable / Khyoot taht al rimal
(2006).
Al-Mohaishi, Bashir Hassan. Saudi filmmaker. Born in 1980, he studied fine art at King
Saud University, Riyadh. Short fictional films:
My Lord, Send Me Back (2005, 38', Mini DV),
Soil Complaint (2007, 35', DVD).
56
Al-Moheissen, Abdullah. Saudi filmmaker. Born in 1947 in Saudi Arabia, he studied philosophy and film in London. On his return to Saudi Arabia, he set up an advertising
company, equipped with the first film studios
in the kingdom. He made a number of short
films: Islam: A Bridge to the Future / Islam,
un pont pour lavenir, The Killing of a City /
Lassassinat dune ville, The Shock / Le choc.
Feature film: Shadow of Silence / Les ombres
du silence / Dhalal al-samt (2006, 110', 35mm).
Al-Moherat, Firas Abd al-Jalil. Jordanian
filmmaker. Worked in television and made
his short film in the UAE. Short documentary
film: The Death Is Coming from Horses (2006,
26', DigiBeta).
Al-Moodi, Reem. Emirati filmmaker. She
films: Paranoia (2006, 1', Mini DV), Hard to
Fix (2006, 1', Mini DV).
Al-Motiri, Rja Sair. Saudi filmmaker. Also
journalist. Short film: Margin (2007, 4', Mini
DV).
Al-Muathen, Amira. Emirati filmmaker. She
Thalessemia (2007, 1', DV Cam).
Al-Muhairi, Aisha Mohamed Obaid. Emirati
filmmaker. A media student who graduated in
2008. Short film: Mission of Hope / Mashroo
amal (with Asma Ahmad, 2008, 21', Mini DV).
Al-Muhairi, Amna Ateeq. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at Abu Dhabi Womens College. Short documentary films: Harley Davidson (2001, 4', DV Cam), Zayed: Always in Our
Hearts (2006, 13', DV Cam).
Al-Muhairi, Ayesha Mohammed. Emirati
filmmaker. Born in 1986, she studied at Dubai
Womens College. Short film: Would You Give
Up Your Home? (2006, 2', Mini DV).
Al-Muhairi, Fadel Saeed. Emirati filmmaker.
Born in 1979 in Abu Dhabi, he studied filmmaking at the American University of Shar-
jah. Student films: Tolerance (2002, 3', DV

Cam), Al-Raaboob (2003, 34', DV Cam), Xs
(2003, 15', DV Cam), Once upon a Night (2003,
25', DV Cam). Short films: Al-Ghaith (2004,
38', Beta SP), Under Construction / Kaid alinsahaa (2006, 18', DVD), Ras Harba (2008,
57', HDV).
Al-Muhairi, Hamda Mohamed. Emirati
filmmaker. She studied at Abu Dhabi Womens College. Short fictional films: The Little
Boy (2002, 3', DV Cam), A Fathers Loss (2002,
4', DV Cam), Our Right to Ride (2009, 51', HD
Cam).
Al-Mulla al-Muhairi, Hana Abdullah Mohammed. Emirati filmmaker. Born in 1984
in Dubai, she studied at Dubai Womens College. Short films: Adolescent Colors (with Maitha Ebrahim, Nada Salem, Wafa Faisal, Heba
al-Dhanhani, 2005, 28', DV Cam), Give Them
Way (2006, 7', Mini DV).
Al-Mulla, Alya Mohamed Ali. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short film: Workers at Nine Ball
Caf (with Vivian Mamdouh Ibrahim, 2003,
15', DV Cam).
Al-Mulla, Fatma. Emirati filmmaker. She
studied at the American University of Sharjah.
Short films: Marriage and Appearances among
the UAE Youths (2006, 4', Mini DV), Al-Amal
(2006, 13', Mini DV), The Pearl (2006, 16', Mini
DV).
Al-Mulla, Saoud Mohamed Ali. Emirati
filmmaker. He studied at Abu Dhabi Mens
College. Short film: See You There (2002, 10',
DV Cam).
Al-Murry, Saeed Salmeen. Emirati filmmaker. Born in 1968 in the UAE. Short films: Sand
Remains (2004, 38', DV Cam), Walls (2005, 40',
DVC Pro), A Traveler (2005, 9', Mini DV), Hoboob (2005, 22', DVC Pro), Erj-al-Tein (2006,
10', DVC Pro), The Blood Wedding (2007, 21',
DV Cam), Al-Ghobna (2007, 13', DigiBeta),
Mariams Daughter / La fille de Mariam / Bint
Mariam (2008, 27', DigiBeta).
Almushrrakh, Fatma. Emirati filmmaker.
She studied at the American University of
Sharjah. Short film: Alcoholism (with Khalid
Abdullah, 1', Mini DV).
57
Al-Obali, Jawad. Iraqi filmmaker. Feature film: Painful Nights / Les nuits de douleur
/ Layali al-adab (1963, 35mm).
Al-Obeidi, Abdi Jabar. Iraqi filmmaker.
Feature film: At Dawn / laube / Maa al-fahr
(1964, 35mm).
Al-Mutawa, Ahmed. Emirati filmmaker. He

studied at the Academy of Art University in
San Francisco and took courses at UCLA,
while working on various U.S. productions.
Short films: Moments! (2006, 4', 16mm), Palaces of Sand (2006, 4', 16mm).
Al-Obeidi, Kamel. Iraqi filmmaker. Feature film: The Hand of Fate / La main du destin
/ Yad al-qadar (1964, 35mm).
Al-Mutawa, Hafsa. Emirati filmmaker. She

Thalassemia (2006, 1', DC Cam).
Alomain, Abdullah Ibrahim. Saudi filmmaker. Short film: A Message to a Writer (2008, 3',
Mini DV).
Al-Naboulsi, Khalil Sameer. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at UAE University. Short

fictional film: Between Rita and My Eyes (2004,
24', DV Cam).
Alomary, Mohammed. Qatari filmmaker.

Born in Jordan. Short documentary film: Souk
Waqif (with Dawoud Hassan, 2007, 10', DV
Cam).
Al-Nazwani, Ahmed Hassan. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at UAE University. Short

fictional films: From Birth (2003, 8', Beta SP),
In the Fires Womb (2004, 16', DV Cam), In
Brackets (2005, 6', Mini DV).
Al-Omer, Hyder. Iraqi filmmaker. Feature films: Fitna and Hassan / Fitna et Hassan
/ Fitna wa Hassan (1950, 35mm), Take Pity
on Me / Ayez piti de moi / Irhamoini (1958,
35mm).
Al-Nejaim, Abdulaziz Nasser. Saudi filmmaker. Born in 1986 in Riyadh, he worked in

theatre and film while still a student at Imam
Islamic University. Short fictional films: Disobedience (2007, 20', Mini DV), The Note
(2008, 5', Mini DV).
Al-Otaiba, Mohammed. Emirati filmmaker.

He studied at the New York Film Academy and
made Empty Clip (2003) in the United States.
Short films: Afghan Days (2004, 31', Mini DV),
Petra 2025 AD (2006, 5', Mini DV).
Al-Neyadi, Yaser Saeed. Emirati filmmaker.

Also child actor. Short fictional films: Person
of Cup (2006, 4', Mini DV), The Dreams Seller
(2006, 18', Mini DV), And He Returned (2007,
25', Mini DV), Letters to the Sky (2008, 18',
Mini DV), Temporary Drought (2009, 15', HD
Cam).
Al-Nizer, Ali Khalifa. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied at the Dubai Mens College. Short film:
A Race Home (2002, 6', Beta SP).
Al-Obaid, Mohammed Mahde. Saudi filmmaker. Short animated film: Namool Adventures (2008, 19', Mini DV).
Alotaibi, Faisal Shahid. Saudi filmmaker.

Documentary producer for Saudi and Emirati television. Short documentary film: Bride
of Mountains and Archeology (2006, 43', DV
Cam).
Alowais, Nasir. Emirati filmmaker. Underwater wildlife videographer. Short film: The Unexplored Socotra (2005, 13', DV Cam).
Al-Qadami, Jaafar. Bahraini filmmaker.
Short documentary film: Hearts Imprint
(2006, 10', DV Cam).
Al-Qallaf, Hussain. Emirati filmmaker. Short
film: HIV+ (2008, 1', Mini DV).
58
Alqasab, Mohammad Noaman. Bahraini

filmmaker. Also an actor. Short fictional films:
The Unknown Step (2001), I Will Keep on Loving You (2003, 15', DV Cam), Knife (2004, 8',
Mini DV), The Last Match (2005, 22', Mini
DV), Follow (2006, 6', Mini DV), Leave a Legacy (2007, 5', Mini DV), The Debarred Area
(2007, 28', Mini DV).
Al-Qasimi, Aisha. Emirati filmmaker. Born
in 1982 in Sharjah, she studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short films: Nike
(2004, 1', Mini DV), Next (with Dareen alSarraj, 2004, 11', Mini DV), Another Day (with
Dareen al-Sarraj, 2004, 4', Mini DV), When
a Girl (with Dareen al-Sarraj, 2004, 7', Mini
DV).
Al-Qassimi, Maryam. Emirati filmmaker.
Short film: Global Warning (with Mamoun
Alzoughbi, 2007, 1', Mini DV).
Al-Qassimi, Maysoon. Emirati filmaker. She
is a poet, novelist, and conceptual artist who
has lived mostly in Egypt. Her film was made
in the UAE and Egypt. Short film: Thread After Thread (2005, 12', Beta SP).
Al-Qassimi, Salem Faisal. Emirati filmmaker. Born in 1984, he studied at the American
University of Sharjah. Short films: My Way
(2003, 8', DV Cam), Static Identity (2004, 3',
Mini DV).
Al-Qattan, Omar. Palestinian filmmaker.
Born in in 1964 in Lebanon of Palestinian parents, he studied filmmaking at INSAS in Belgium, where his graduation film was Tale of a
Blind Man and a Paralytic / Conte de laveugle
et du paralytique (1988, 16'). He has lived in
England since 1975. He worked with Michel
Khleifi as executive producer of The Tale of
the Three Jewels (1996) and Mixed Marriages
in the Holy Land (1995). Documentaries: Jerusalem / Jrusalem (1998, 25'), Dreams and Silence/ Rves et silence / Ahlma fi fairagh (1991,
52', 16mm), Going Home / Le retour / al-Awda
(1995, 50', Beta SP), Diary of an Art Competition (Under Curfew) / Yaomiyyat musabiqa
faniyya taht al-hisar (2002, 17', Beta SP).
Al-Qood, Bader Johar. Emirati filmmaker.

Short fictional film: Jerusalem, Who Will Defend You Now? (2002, 3', video).
Al-Qubaisi, Mohamed Abdullah. Emirati
filmmaker. He studied at the Abu Dhabi Mens
College. Short film: Between Yesterday and
Today (with Khalid al-Fardan and Mohamed
Najm al-Qubaisi, 1998, 2', DV Cam.
Al-Qubaisi, Mohamed Najm. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at the Abu Dhabi Mens
College. Short films: Between Yesterday and
Today (with Khalid al-Fardan and Mohamed
Abdullah al-Qubaisi, 1998, 2', DV Cam), Adnoc Ad (1999, 1', DV Cam).
Al-Qubaisi, Nadir. Emirati filmmaker. She
film: Al Alali (2002, 1', DV Cam).
Al-Rabeea, Saif Fadhel. Emirati filmmaker.
He studied at Sharjah University. Short film:
My Emirates (2006, 4', Mini DV).
Al-Raheb, Waha. Syrian filmmaker, writer, and actress. She was born in 1960 in Cairo,
daughter of Syrian parents. Her father was
a diplomat, so she went to school in various
cities, including Moscow and Khartoum. She
studied at the Fine Art Academy in Damascus
and at the Universit de Paris VIII. She lives in
Damascus and works there as an actress and
director in Syrian television. She has also appeared in various films, including Mohamed
Malass City Dreams and written screenplays
and a book on women in Syrian cinema. She
has made a number of tlfilms (Blue Glass
Pearls / Perles de verre bleu, 1997, and A Suitcase for the New Year / Une valise pour la nouvelle anne, 1999), a seven-part television series, Family House / Maison de famille (2001),
and a TV childrens series, This Is the One /
Tilka al-lati (2004). One short fictional film:
An Optional Exile (1987), and a documentary
film: Our Grandmothers / Nos grand-mres
(1987, 30', 35mm). Feature film: Dreamy Visions / Visions chimriques a.k.a. Vision de
rve / Raa halima (2003, 125', 35mm).
Al-Rahman, Nasser Jaber. Emirati filmmaker. Short film: Educational Contrasts (2007,
20', Mini DV).
Al-Rahman, Saleh. Emirati filmmaker. Born
in 1980. Short fictional film: Star of Stars
(2006, 17', Mini DV).
Al-Rahmy, Adnan. Jordanian filmmaker.
Documentary: Cherif Hussein / Le Cherif Hussein / al-Cherif Hussein (1969).
Al-Rais, Maria Mohammad. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at Dubai Womens College.
Short films: Gossip (2006, 1', Mini DV), Killing
Lives (2006, 1', Mini DV).
Al-Rasheed, Amjad. Jordanian filmmaker.
Short fictional films: Disturbance (2007, 7'),
Dali (2008, 25').
Al-Rawas, Amer. Omani filmmaker. Born in
1980 in Oman. Short films: Between Lines and
Mirrors (2005), Belooh (2008, 5', DVD).
Al-Rawi, Abdelhadi. Iraqi filmmaker.
Born in 1938, he trained in the USSR. Documentary: What Have You Done for Palestine
/ Quavez-vous fait pour la Palestine / Madha
qadamta li Filistin (1973). Feature films: Love
in Baghdad / Lamour Bagdad / al-Hubb fi
Baghdad (1986), The House / La maison / alBayt (1988), Iftarid nafsaka Saidan (1990).
Alrayhi, Khalid. Emirati filmmaker. Born in
1979 in Ajam in the UAE, he studied applied
media at the Dubai Mens College and worked
as an animator and graphic designer. Also
editor on a number of shorts. One short animated film: The Day (2001, 7', video), and two
fictional shorts: Superstition between Reality
and Fantasy (with Yasser al-Gargawi, 2002,
15', Beta SP), An Hour (2003, 7', Beta SP).
Al-Redha, Mohamed Jasim. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at the Dubai Mens College.
Short film: Free to Be Free (2007, 3', DV Cam).
Al-Reyami, Hamad Saif. Emirati filmmaker.
Born in 1974, he studied media at the Abu
59
Dhabi Mens College and subsequently worked
in television. Student films: Abu Dhabi Cinemas (2002, 3', DV Cam), Taxi Driver (2002, 5',
DV Cam), F2 Grand Prix (2002, 6', DV Cam),
Memories / Yaadien (2002, 5', DV Cam), The
Nightmare (2003, 34', DV Cam), Debtor (2004,
19', DV Cam). Short films: Emirate Drums in
Frances Neighbourhood (with Juma al-Sahli,
2005, 15', DV Cam), Tones (2005, 9', DV Cam),
Umm al-Dowais . . . In Their Eyes (2006, 10',
DV Cam), Khalaas (2006, 2', DV Cam), Tuna
(2006, 20', Mini DV), Sewage (2007, 7', DV
Cam).
Al-Reyami, Omar. Emirati filmmaker. Born
in Al-Ain, he studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short fictional film: Registration Day (2004, 7', Mini DV).
Al-Reyami, Salem Ghaleb. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at the Abu Dhabi Mens College.
Short films: Shop Clerk (2002, 3', Beta SP),
Trouble Maker (2005, 10', DV Cam).
Al-Rifai, Yahya Basheir. Emirati filmmaker.
He studied at UAE University and has worked
as cameraman on numerous short films. Short
fictional films: Association (2003, 5', Beta SP),
Behind the Walls (2004, 11', Beta SP), Strong
(2005, 1', Beta SP).
Al-Riffaei, Hussain. Bahraini filmmaker.
Short fictional film: Dinner (20', DigiBeta).
Al-Robea, Omar Abdalaziz. Saudi filmmaker. He trained in the theatre. Short film: Msear
(2007, 7', Mini DV).
Al-Romaithi, Fatima Khalifa. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at the Abu Dhabi Womens
College. Short films, one documentary: Arabian Eyes (1999, 5', DV Cam), and one animation: Driving the Boat / Khlid Bu Tilah (2007,
7', DVD).
Al-Romaithi, Rashed Mohamed. Emirati
filmmaker. He studied at Ajman University.
Short film: Heritage Village (2002, 9', Beta SP).
60
Al-Romaithi, Salama. Emirati filmmaker.

Short film: Traditional Dances in the UAE:
Al-Harbia (with Afra al-Mazrouei, 2004, 10',
Mini DV).
Al-Roumi, Adnan. Jordanian filmmaker.
Documentaries on Palestine: Twenty Years /
Vingt ans / Ichrouna am (1968, 16mm), Meeting at Ajloun / Rencontre Ajloun / Liq fi
Ajloun (1968, 28').
Al-Roumi, Meyar. Syrian filmmaker. Born
in 1973 in Damascus, he studied filmmaking
at the Universit de Paris VIII and FEMIS in
Paris. Short documentaries: The Object of Desire / Lobjet du dsir (1997), A Silent Cinema
/ Un cinma muet / Sinima samta (2001, 29',
Beta SP), Waiting for the Day / Lattente du jour
(2003, 53', Beta SP), Rabias Journey / Le voyage
de Rabia (2006, 23', Beta SP), Six Ordinary Stories / Sitat qosas adiyyah (2007, 59', Video HD).
Al-Roumi, Mohamed. Syrian filmmaker.
Born in 1945 in Syrian Mesopotamia, he lives
between Paris and Damascus and has worked
professionally as a photographer since the beginning of the 1970s, selling his work internationally. Short documentary film: Blue-Grey /
Bleu-gris (2004, 23', Beta SP), and a short fictional film: A Journey to the End of the World.
Al-Rumaithi, Shamma Mohamed. Emirati
filmmaker. She studied at Abu Dhabi Womens College. Short documentary films: Ghareem Alshooq: Abdullah Al-Rumaithi (2000, 1',
DV Cam), Desert Rose (2001, 6', Beta SP), The
Trackers (2001, 5', DV Cam).
Al-Saadi, Rasha Ali. Emirati filmmaker. She
films: A Womans Journey (2003, 4', DV Cam),
Mixing in the UAE (2004, 13', DV Cam).
Al-Sabah, Miriam. Emirati filmmaker. She
Short fictional films: A Tail Apart (with Munira al-Doseri, 2004, 4', Mini DV), Faithless
(with Munira al-Doseri, 2004, 4', Mini DV).
Alsabahi, Arwa. Emirati filmmaker. Studied

at the American University of Sharjah. Short
film: Anti-Smoking (with Ahmad Essam, 2007,
1', DVD).
Al-Sabouni, Bilal. Syrian filmmaker. He
graduated from the Cairo Higher Film Institute in 1970, where his graduation film was
Suspension Points / Points de supension / Almatu istifhm (1970). He worked for several
years as assistant director and made a number
of shorts and documentaries: The New Dawn
/ Le nouvel aube / Fajrun jadd (1972), Petrol
/ Lessense / al-Bitrl (1975), Nuclear Medicine
/ La mdecine nuclaire / al-Tibbu al-nawawi
(1978). He also shot one episode, The Sprig of
Mint / Le brin de la menthe / Ud al-nanaa,
of the collective film Shame / La honte / al-Ar
(1974), with Wadeih Yousef and Bashir Safia.
Feature film: The Fifth Arm of the Prison /
La cinquime citadelle / al-Qala al-khmisa
(1979, 90', 35mm).
Al-Sahen, Ibrahim. Iraqi filmmaker. Short
fictional about the Palestinian struggle: It
Happened in June / Cest arriv en juin / Waqaa
fi huzeirn (1973).
Al-Sahli, Juma. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at the Abu Dhabi Mens College. He also
appeared as an actor in numerous shorts.
Short films: Education (2003, 3', Beta SP),
Emirate Drums in Frances Neighbourhood
(with Hamad Saif al-Reyami, 2005, 15', DV
Cam), Saras Secrets (2005, 23', DV Cam), An
Empty Bottle (2005, 19', DigiBeta), The Return
of Umm al-Dowais (2007, 40', DigiBeta), Paradise Evening (2009, 19', HD Cam).
Al-Saidi, Wiam. Lebanese filmmaker. Feature films: Red on the Snow / Rouge sur neige /
Dimaa al-talj (1963, 35mm), Darbat al-wade
(1963, 35mm), Al-Marmoura (1985, 35mm),
At the Time of Pearls / Au temps des perles /
Ayyam al-loulou (1986, 35mm), Me, the Radar
/ Moi, le radar / Ana al-radar (1986, 35mm),
Shame, Restoum / La honte, Restoum / Ayb
ya Restoum (1987, 35mm), For Whoever Sings
of Love / Pour qui chante lamour / Liman
youghanni al-hub (1991, 35mm).
Al-Safi, Hassan.* Egyptian director of
two Syrian feature films: The Two Friends / Les
deux amis (1970, 35mm), Mens Nights / Nuits
des hommes (1975, 35mm).
Al-Salami, Khadija. Yemeni filmmaker.
Born in 1966 in the village of Mabar in North
Yemen, she began hosting a weekly childrens
television show for Yemeni Television in Sanaa at the age of 11. She moved at the age of
16 to the United States, where she studied at
the University of Washington and UCLA.
She now lives in Paris, where she works in
the communication and cultural service of
the Yemeni embassy. She has made a number
of short documentaries: Women of Yemen /
Femmes du Ymen / Mara fi Yemen (1990, 24',
Beta SP), Hadramout, Crossroads of Cultures
/ Hadramout, carrefour des civilisatisations
/ Hadramawt, multaqa al-hadarat (1991, 45',
Beta SP), Land of Saba / Terre de Saba / Ard
al-saba (1997, 55', Beta SP), Yemen of a Thousand Faces (2000), Women and Democracy in
Yemen / Les femmes et la dmocracie au Ymen
/ al-Mara wa-l dimuqratiya fi-l Yemen (2004,
54', Beta SP), and A Stranger in Her Own City
/ Une trangre dans sa ville / al-Ghariba fi
madinatiha (2005, 28', Mini DV). In 2005, she
co-wrote a book with Charles Hoots: Pleure,
reine de Saba. Feature-length documentary:
Amina (2006, 75', DV Cam).
Al-Saleh, Nouri. Kuwaiti filmmaker. Directed a documentary on Palestine for Kuwaiti
television: Fatima el Bernaoui (1968, 25').
Al-Salty, Jassim Mohamed. Emirati filmmaker. Studied applied media studies at the
Dubai Mens College. Short films: Fish Market
(2004, 5', Mini DV), Al-hellah (2005, 18', Mini
DV).
Al-Samari, Abdl Khaliq. Iraqi filmmaker. Feature film: Regrets / Nadam (1955).
Al-Samari, Hussen. Iraqi filmmaker.
Feature film: Tiswahen (1957), The Reward /
La rcompense / Al-jaza (1970, unreleased).
61
Al-Sanousi, Mohamed. Kuwaiti filmmaker.
Born in 1940, he studied filmmaking in the
United States before making the first Kuwaiti
short film, The Storm / La tempte / al-Asifa
(1964).
Al-Saraj, Abdel Karim. Iraqi filmmaker. Feature film: The Path of Darkness / La voie
des tnbres / Tariq al-dalam (1970, 35mm).
Al-Sarkal, Mariam Jassim. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at Dubai Womens College.
Short film: Poverty in the UAE (with Buthaina
al-Hashemi and Amena Saif al-Suboosi, 2002,
6', Beta SP).
Al-Sarraj, Dareen. Emirati filmmaker.
Born in 1981 in Sharjah, she studied at the
American University of Sharjah. Short films:
Landrover (2004, 1', Mini DV), Next (with Aisha al-Qasimi, 2004, 11', Mini DV), Another
Day (2004, 4', Mini DV), When a Girl (with
Aisha al-Qasimi, 2004, 7', Mini DV), Level 7
Underground (2004, 7', Mini DV).
Al-Sawalmeh, Mohamed. Palestinian filmmaker. He studied filmmaking in Moscow and
has made a dozen documentaries on Palestinian society for the PLO and the Palestinian
Ministry of Culture and Information, among
the latter Intifada (1988), The Coming Fire / Le
feu qui progresse / al-Nahr al-qadima (1998,
52', video), The Doorman for the Numeral / Le
portier du chiffre / Bawaba li al-raqam (1998),
Night of the Soldiers / La nuit des soldats / Layla al-junud (2002, 15', Beta SP).
Al-Sayed, Moza Ali. Emirati filmmaker. She
films: Desert Boys (with Kadija al-Yousuf,
2004, 10', DV Cam), His Abstract Life (2005, 3',
Mini DV).
Al-Shabibi, Fatema Salem. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at Abu Dhabi Womens College. Short film: Bazaar (with Shaikha Rashed
al-Braikhi and Amani Ahmed al-Lawghani,
2003, 3', DV Cam).
62
Al-Shaibani, Hani. Emirati filmmaker.

Born in 1974 in Dubai, he studied communication at Cairo University and then worked as
film director for the police communications
unit in Dubai. His short, Jawhara, won best
short film prize at the Emirates Film Competition in Abu Dhabi and the MEIFF in Abu
Dhabi. He has directed numerous short films
and collaborated as writer, editor, or actor on
several others. Short films: Whirling (1994,
4', video), Message from Hell / Lettre denfer
(2000, 13', Beta SP), Birthday, the Ring, and
Other / Anniversaire, la bague et tant dautres
choses (2001, 23', Beta SP), A Warm Winter
Night / Une nuit dhiver chaude (2001, 27', DV
Cam), Jawhara (2003, 29', Beta SP), 01'03 (collective film with eleven other directors, 2004,
12', Mini DV), Innocence (2007, 3', Mini DV),
Young Sadness (2009, 15', DigiBeta). Feature
films: A Dream (2005, 71', 35mm), Jumaa and
the Sea / Jumaa et la mer / Jumaa wa al-bahr
(2007, 68'), The Hotel (2009, 57', DigiBeta).
Al-Shaibani, Mohammed. Emirati filmmaker. Short films: Waiting for AUS (2007, 11',
Mini DV), Game Plan (2007, 2', Mini DV), The
In Out (2007, 2', Mini DV).
Alshaibi, Sama. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
experimental film: All I Want for Christmas
(2007, 6').
Al-Shaikh, Hassan Abdulrahman. Emirati
filmmaker. He studied at Dubai Mens College. Short fictional film: Once a Child (2006,
3', DV Cam).
Alshakaili, Hamad bin Salem. Omani filmmaker. Also playwright and theatre director.
Short fictional film: Before Sunset (2006, 10',
DV Cam).
Al-Shami, Abdallah. Emirati fillmmaker. He
Short films: Emes (2004, 3', Mini DV), The Stupor of Death (2004, 3', Mini DV).
Al-Shamsi, Abdallah Rashid. Emirati filmmaker. Born in 1988, he studied at Sharjah
University. Short film: The Watch (2006, 29',

Mini DV).
Al-Shamsi, Alia. Emirati filmmaker. Born in
1985, she studied at Dubai Womens College.
Short films: Florist (with Khadija Hussain alBuloshi, 2005, 10', Mini DV), Through Childs
Eyes (with Khadija Hussain al-Buloshi, 2005,
6', Mini DV), Fly Fly Fly = Die (2006, 2', Mini
DV), No Vacancy (with Khadija Hussain alBuloshi, 2006, 13', Mini DV).
Al-Sharif, Shamsa. Emirati filmmaker: She
films: Unpretty (2005, 4', Mini DV), Non-Verbal Language (2005, 2', DV Cam), The Bride
Has It All (2007, 10', DV Cam).
Al-Shateri, Hana. Emirati filmmaker. She
studied at UAE University. Short fictional
films: The Beginning of an End (2007, 8', DV
Cam), Something (2008, 8', Mini DV).
Al-Shawwa, Zuhayr. Syrian filmmaker.
Feature films: The Green Valley / La valle verte
/ al-Wadi al-akhdar (1950, 35mm), Beyond the
Borders / Au-del des frontires / Wara alhudud (1963, 35mm), Satans Game / Le jeu de
Satan / Labat al-shaytan (1966, 35mm).
Al-Shayeb, Ibtisam Ahmed. Emirati filmmaker. Studied at UAE University and worked
in television from the mid-1990s. Short documentary films: Memory of a Wall (2001, 17',
DigiBeta), The Return (2002, 11', Beta SP).
Alshehhi, Rashid Abdullah Abdul Aziz Alfahad. Emirati filmmaker. He studied computer science at university. Short film: Boat
Story (2005, 10', Mini DV).
Al-Shehhi, Walid. Emirati filmmaker. He
works at the Higher Colleges of Technology,
Ras al-Khaima. He has also worked as editor
on a number of short films. Short films: Epitaphs (2001, 6', Mini DV), The Martyr (2001,
15', Mini DV), Faces and Windows (2003,
54', DV Cam), Aushbas Well (2004, 17', video), Signs of the Dead (2005, 26', Mini DV),
Ahmed Suliman (2006, 19', Mini DV), The Wa-
ter Guard (2007, 11', Mini DV), Door / Baab
(2008, 20', DigiBeta).
Al-Sheihk, Mustafa. Emirati filmmaker.
Short films: Ali and the Magic Lamp (2003, 27',
Beta SP), The Alive Dead (2003, 10', DV Cam).
Al-Shemsi, Jassim Ali. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied at Dubai Mens College. Short films:
Concentrate More (2002, 1', DV Cam), Obey
the Traffic Laws (2002, 1', DV Cam), Beauty by
Design: The Mosques of Sharjah (2003, 15', DV
Cam).
Al-Shirawi, Ahmed Mohammed. Emirati
filmmaker. He studied at UAE University.
Short film: Hassan Sharif (2004, 9', DV Cam).
Al-Shirqawi, Bakr. Palestinian filmmaker.
Documentary film: War in Lebanon / La
guerre au Liban / al-Harb fi Lubnan (co-dir.,
1977).
Al-Siddick, Khalid. Kuwaiti filmmaker.
Born in 1945 in Kuwait City, he abandoned
the business studies in Bombay (Mumbai)
proposed by his father to study photography
and then filmmaking at the Poona Institute
in India. He worked in television in the Emirates and also took film courses in England, the
United States, and Italy. He made a number of
short films: The Falcon / Le faucon / al-Saqr
(1965, 35mm), The Last Voyage / Le dernier
voyage / al-Rihla al-akhra (1966, 35mm), Faces of the Night / Visages de la nuit / Wufhu
al-layl (1968, 35mm), The Canal / Le canal /
al-hufra (1969), The Stage of Hope / La scne
de lesprance / Masrah al-amal. His first feature is a realistic study of fishermens lives, his
second, a Sudanese co-production, is adapted
from the novel by the Sudanese writer Tayeb
Saleh (who also wrote Season of Migration to
the North), while his third was shot in India
and is based on a story by Boccaccio. Feature
films: The Cruel Sea / La mer cruelle / Basya
bahr (1972, 90', 35mm), The Wedding of Zein
/ Les noces de Zein / Urs al-Zayn (1976, 105',
35mm), Chahin / Shhn (1985).
63
Al-Suboosi, Amena Saif. Emirati filmmaker.
documentary film: Poverty in the UAE (with
Mariam Jassim al-Sarkal and Buthaina alHashemi, 2002, 6', Beta SP).
Alsuwaidi, Oshba Ahmad. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at Dubai Womens College.
Short film: Crystal Meth (2006, 1', DV Cam).
Al-Suwaidi, Rehab Ibrahim. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at Dubai Womens College.
Short film: They Made the Cat Eat My Tongue
(2006, 1', Mini DV).
Al-Suwaidi, Saeed Mohamed. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at Dubai Mens College.
Short film: My Immortal (2004, 5', DV Cam).
Al-Suwaidi, Salwa Hassan. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at Abu Dhabi Womens College. Short documentary film: Still We Struggle
(2000, 12', DV Cam).
Al-Suwaidi, Sumaya. Emirati filmmaker. She
fictional film: Sabny (2001, 3', DV Cam).
Al-Tahri, Jihan. Lebanese filmmaker. Documentary film: AfricaShuffling the Cards /
LAfrique en morceaux, la tragdie des grands
lacs (with Peter Chappell, 1982, 57').
Al-Tamimi, Theyab. Emirati filmmaker. He
Short films: Newsnews (2004, 10', Mini DV),
September 12th (with Hani Alireza, 2005, 11',
Mini DV).
Al-Thawadi, Bassam. Bahraini filmmaker. Born in 1960 in Bahrain, he studied
at the Cairo Higher Institute of Cinema and
then worked as a documentary filmmaker
for the Ministry of Information and Bahraini
television. Three shorts: The Masked Man / Le
masqu / Al-qinqu (1982, 16mm), Angels on
Earth / Les anges sur la terre / Malikatu al-ard
(1983, 16mm), and The Confession (1984, 34',
DVD). Director of the first Bahraini feature.
64
Feature films: The Obstacle a.k.a. The Barrier /

Lobstacle / Al-hajiz (1990, 88', 35mm), Visitor
/ Visiteur (2002, 86', 35mm), A Bahraini Tale
/ Un conte de Bahrain / Hekaya Bahrainiya
(2008, 96', 35mm).
Al-Toukhi, Ahmed.* Egyptian filmmaker who made two Lebanese feature films:
Burning Heart / Cur brlant / Fi kalbiha nar
(1960, 35mm), Birth of the Prophet / Naissance du prophte / Mawled al-rassoul (1960,
35mm).
Al-Traifi, Mohamed. Emirati filmmaker. Born in 1976 in Sudan, he worked in
theatre as a playwright and in technical roles.
Short films: Candle for My Sweetheart (2003,
50', DV Cam), Cigarettes (2004, 13', HD), Pay
for Their Eyes (2004, 19', DV Cam). Feature
film: Haneen (2006, 92', video).
Al-Tuhami, Fouad.* Egyptian filmmaker
who made one Iraqi film. Feature film: The Attempt / Lessai a.k.a. Lexprience / al-Tajruba
(1977).
Altunayan, Mousa Jafer. Saudi filmmaker.
Short film: Leftover Food (2007, 9', DVD).
Alwan, Amer. Iraqi filmmaker. Born in
1957 in Babylon, he studied at the National
School of Dramatic Art and the Audio-Visual
School in Baghdad, then worked as writer-director in Iraqi television. He left Iraq in 1940 to
study the philosophy of art in Paris. In France
he made a number of short films and documentaries, as well as working on a feature film
with Andr Tchin. Documentary: The Children of the Embargo / Les enfants de lembargo
(2000, 26', Beta SP). His sole feature is a French
co-production. Feature film: Zaman, The Reed
Man / Zaman, lhomme aux roseaux (2003,
77', 35mm).
Alwan, Hussein. Iraqi filmmaker. Short fictional film on the Palestine struggle: The Current / Le courant / al-Sakya (1973).
Al-Yakoubi, Nasser. Emirati filmmaker. Born
in the Emirates, he studied at the Radio and
Television Academy in Egypt. Short films: The
Bleeding, The Martyr, The Decision, Roots and

Seeds, Mountain Sheik / Sheik al-jabal (2008,
11', Mini DV).
Al-Yaqobi, Naser. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied documentary filmmaking in Egypt.
Also an actor. Short film: Sneaker (2007, 13',
Mini DV).
Al-Yasen, Mohamed al-Din. Iraqi
filmmaker. Feature film: I Am Iraq / Je suis
lIrak / Ana al-Irak (1960, 35mm).
Al-Yasen, Mohamed Monir. Iraqi
filmmaker. Feature film: Doctor Hassan /
Docteur Hassan / Doctor Hassan (1958, 35mm).
Al-Yassir, Nada. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
films: Mirage / Sarab (2000), Four Songs for
Palestine / Quatre chants pour la Palestine /
Arbaa aghani li Filastin (2001, 13', Beta SP),
Paradise / Naim paradise (2001), All That Remained (2005). Also contributed one episode
to the collectively made video documentary
One More Time (Five Stories about Human
Rights in Palestine / Une fois encore (cinq histoires sur les droits de lhomme en Palestine)
(with Ismal Habash, Tawfik Abu Wael, Abdel
Salam Shehada, Najwa Najjar, 2002, 57', Beta
SP).
Al-Yassiri, Fayal. Iraqi filmmaker.
Born in 1923, he trained in the German Democratic Republic and in Austrian television,
in Vienna, worked in Iraqi television and in
what was then East Berlin. Then he directed
tlfilms in Damascus (his first television feature was never released). He is also a pioneer
of the animated film in Iraq, and has made
various television series for the Gulf. Shorts:
Abdallahs Story / Lhistoire dAbdallah (in the
RDA), The Awe-inspiring Meeting / La rencontre grandiose (for television), All Is Well / Tout
va bien / Nahnou bi kheir (1969, 11'), The Strategic Aims / Les buts stratgiques / al-Ahdaf alistratijyiyya (1974), Our Childrens New Toys /
Les nouveaux jouets de nos enfants (1974, 9').
Feature films: The Man / Lhomme / al-Rajul
(1968), Love and Karat / Lamour et karat /
Hubb wa karati (1973), Hamidous Return / Le
retour dHamidou / Awdat Hamidu (1974), A
Very Particular Love / Un amour tout particulier / Gharmit khasa jidan (1974), The Head
/ La tte / al-Ras (1976, 35mm), Lovers on the
Road / Les amants en route / Ushqal al-tariq
(1977, 35mm), The River / Le fleuve / al-Nahr
(1977, 90', 35mm), The Sniper / Le canardeur
a.k.a. Un jour Beyrouth / al-Qannes (1980,
35mm), The Princess and the River / La princesse et le fleuve / al-Amira wal-Nahr (animated feature, 1982, 35mm).
Al-Yousuf, Khadija. Emirati filmmaker. She
films: Desert Boys (with Moza Ali al-Sayed,
2004, 10', DV Cam), The Other Side (2005, 5',
DV Cam).
Al-Zaabi, Fatima. Emirati filmmaker. She
documentary film: Millennium Marriage
(2000, 3', DV Cam).
Al-Zadjali, Khalid. Omani filmmaker.
Born at Muscat in Oman, he studied at the
Cairo Higher Film Institute, graduating in
1989. He became a scriptwriter and producer in the television service of the Sulinate of
Oman and was also involved in student and
drama organizations. Feature film: The Dawn
/ Laube / Al-Boom (2006, 110', 35mm).
Al-Zain, Osama. Palestinian filmmaker. He
studied at the American University in Washington, D.C., where he now lives. Documentaries: Reflection (2002, 1', Beta SP), Transparency
(2002, 30', DV). Feature-length documentary:
Palestine Post-9/11 / La Palestine aprs le 11
septembre (2005, 73').
Al-Zamel, Tareq. Kuwaiti filmmaker. He
studied filmmaking in the United States and
now works in television and at the American
University of Kuwait. Short film: Under the
Sky of Kuwait (2006, 50', Bigi Beta).
Alzarooni, Essa. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at Sharjah University. Short fictional film:
Lost in Communication College (2006, 5', Mini
DV).
65
Al-Zarouni, Azza. Emirati filmmaker. Studied at the Abu Dhabi Womens College. Short
experimental films: Blue (2000, 3', DV Cam),
Finally (2001, 3', DV Cam).
Al-Zeidi, Faleh. Iraqi filmmaker. Feature
film: Afra and Bader / Afra et Bader / Afra wa
Bader (1963, 35mm).
Al-Zeidi, Tawfik. Saudi filmmaker. Work in
television. Short fictional film: The Fabricated
Crime / Al-Garima al-murakaba (2006, 22',
DV Cam).
Al-Ziyoudi, Fatima. Emirati filmmaker. She
studied mass communcation at UAE University. Short documentary film: Al-Gars (with
Hiba Saleh al-Jermi, 2007, 5', DVD).
Al-Zobadi, Sobhi. Palestinian filmmaker
and actor. Born in 1961 in Jerusalem, he studied economics at the University of Bir Zeit and
filmmaking at the University of New York.
He worked as an actor from 1982 till 1994. He
has made several documentaries on Palestine,
including My Very Private Map / Ma carte
gographique moi / Kharitati-l-khassa jiddan
(1998, 21', video), Women in the Sun / Femmes
au soleil / Nisa fi alshams (1999, 57'), Ali and
His Friends / Ali et ses amis / Ali wa-ashabhu
(2000, 12', Beta SP), Light at the End of the Tunnel / La lumire au bout du tunnel / Dufi akhar
al-nafaq (2000, 47', Beta SP), Looking Awry /
Dcale / Shawwal (2001, 34', video), Crossing
Kalandia Roadblock / Ubur Kalandia (2002,
52', video), A Caged Birds Song / La chanson
un oiseau en cage / Uqiyyatair sijjin (2003),
A Long Arab Film / Un long film arabe / Film
arabi tawil (2006).
Alzoughbi, Mamoun. Emirati filmmaker.
Short film: Global Warning (with Maryam alQassimi, 2007, 1', Mini DV).
Al-Zouki, Hicham. Syrian filmmaker. Born
in 1968 in Damascus, where he studied English literature. In 1999, he completed his film
at the Film and TV Academy in Oslo, where he
is now based. Short films and documentaries:
66
Nostalgia / La nostalgie (1998), The Door / La

porte / Doren (1999, 7', 35mm), Ghetto (2000,
3'), Eternally Aliens (2002, 25', DigiBeta), Just a
City / Juste une ville / Moujarad madina (2003,
13', DV Cam), The Wash / Le Lavage / Vaskeriet (2006, 35', 35mm).
Al-Zubaidi, Saad Hassan. Yemeni filmmaker.
He studied filmmaking in Moscow and has
completed one 60' film.
Al-Zubaydi, Qays. Iraqi filmmaker who
worked largely in Syria and directed one Syrian feature film: Al-Yazirli (1974). Born in 1939
in Baghdad, he trained as a cameraman and
editor from 1959 to 1968 at Babelsberg in what
was then East Germany (RDA). Worked in
Syrian television, making a number of documentaries, including his first, Far from the
Homeland / Loin de la patrie / Baid . . . an
al-watan (1969. He also worked extensively
as editor, director, and scriptwriter for Syrian
television and the National Cinema Organisation. Much of his work is focused on Palestinian issues. He has continued working as
a film editor for other directors, for example,
on Nabil al-Malehs Crown of Thorns, Omar
Amiralays Daily Life in a Syrian Village, Maroun Bagdadis Lebanese Beirut Oh Beirut,
and Mohamed Malass The Night. Short films
include: Far From the Homeland / Loin de la
patrie / Baidan an-il ardh (1969, 11'), The Visit
/ La visite / al-Ziyara (1972, 15'), Palestinian
Childrens Testimonies in a Time of War / Les
tmoinages des enfants palestiniens lheure de
la guerre / Shahdat al-atfl fi zaman al-harb
(1972, 25'), A Voice from Jerusalem / Une voix
de Jrusalem / Sawt min alquds (1977), An Opposite Seige / Hisar moddad (1978), The Nation
of Barbed Wire a.k.a. Barbed Wire Homeland
/ La nation aux barbels / Watan al-aslak alshaika (1980, 60'), Opposition / Lopposition /
Muwajihha (1984), Dossier of a Massacre a.k.a.
Slaughter File / Dossier dun massacre / Milf
al-mujazirra (1984), Colours / Couleurs / Alwn (1988). His sole fictional feature film was
made in Syria. Feature films: Al-Yasseri (1974,
35mm), Palestine: A Peoples Record a.k.a. Palestine: The Chronicle of a People / La Palestine,
chronique dun peuple / Filstin, sjil sha (1984,

110', 35mm) (documentary).
Al-Zuhair, Amer. Kuwaiti filmmaker.
Feature-length documentary: When the People Spoke / Lorsque le peuple a parl / Indama
rtakalam al-shaab (2007, 83').
Al-Zuhairi, Bahram. Iraqi filmmaker. Studied at the Independent Film & TV College in
Baghdad. Short documentary film: Leaving
(2007, 23').
Amin, Jamal. Iraqi filmmaker. Documentary:
Spare Parts / Pices dtaches (2006, 28', video).
Amiralay, Omar. Syrian filmmaker.
Born in 1944 in Damascus, he studied first at
the Fine Art Academy in Damascus, then drama at the Sorbonne and filmmaking, in 1967,
at IDHEC in Paris. On his return he made
three documentaries in Syria: Film Essay
about the Euphrates Dam / Essai sur un barrage de lEuphrate / Muhawwalu sudd al-furat
(1970, 13'), a first feature-length documentary
and The Hens / Les poules / al-Faraij (1977, 45',
video). He then directed a documentary on the
socialist revolution in Yemen, About a Revolution / Au sujet dune rvolution / An al-thawra
(1978, 35', Beta SP), and a study of the civil
war in Lebanon, Some Peoples Misfortunes /
Le malheur des uns / Maaibu qawmin (1982,
50', 16mm). In the 1980s he worked largely for
French television and later set up his own production company, Ramad Films, in Paris. His
documentaries include A Scent of Paradise /
Un parfum de paradis / Raihat al-janna (1982,
40', Beta SP), The Sarcophagus of Love / Le sarcophage de lamour / al-Hub al-mawud (1984,
52', 16mm), Video on the Sand / Vido sur sable / Vidio alal rimali (1984, 45', Beta SP), The
Intimate Enemy / Lennemi intime / al-Arduu
al-hamim (1986, 55', 16mm), Islamic Renewals / Renouveaux islamiques (1986, 52', video),
The Lady from Shibam / La dame de Shibam
(1988, 13', 16mm), For the Attention of Madam
Prime Minister Benazir Bhutho / lattention
de Madame le Premier Ministre Benazir Butho
(1989, 52', Beta SP), On a Day of Ordinary Vio-
lence, My Friend Michel Seurat / Par un jour
de violence ordinaire, mon ami Michel Seurat
/ Fi awm min ayyam al-unf al-adi (1996, 50',
Beta SP), There Are Still So Many Things to Say
/ Il y a encore tant de choses raconter / Hunalia ashiya kathira kana yumken an yatahadath anha al-mare (1997, 50', Beta SP), The
Dish of Sardines / Le plat de sardines / Tabaq
al-sardin (1998, 18', video), The Man with the
Golden Soles / Lhomme aux semelles dor /
Rajol al-hitha al-thahabi (2000, 55', Beta SP),
and Flooding in the Land of the Baath Party /
Dluge au pays du Baas / Tufan fi balad el-bath
(2003, 46', Beta SP). He also co-directed two
documentary portraits, with Mohamed Malas and Oussama Mohammad, Shadows and
Light / Nouron wa thilal (1991, 52', Beta SP),
on the pioneer filmmaker Nazir Shahbandar,
and Fateh al-Moudarress (1995, 52', Beta SP).
Feature-length documentary: Everday Life in
a Syrian Village / La vie quotidienne dans un
village syrien / Al-hayat al-yawmiya fi qaria
Suriya (1974, 80', Beta SP).
Amiri, Noura. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at Dubai Womens College. Short documetary film: This Working Life (2004, 16', Mini
DV).
Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. A remarkable and highly active experiment in
filmmaking by ordinary people, set up in
2003 and run by Hazim Bitar. The members
include: Yahya Abdullah (teacher), Mohamed
Aboujarad (computer network administrator), Sajeda Abousaif (teacher), Dalia Alkury
(public sector), Muna Asmar (graphic designer), Rifqi Assaf (director and writer), Reem
Bader (retail sector), Ala Diab, (graphic designer), Yazan Doughan (student), Hussam
Hamarneh (hardware store manager), Mais
Hamarneh (n/a), Ahmad Humeid (co-founder SYTAX), Saleh Kasem (student), Razan
Khatib (IT manager), Suhad Khatib (graphic
designer, filmmaker), Aseel Mansour (IT
consultant), Aseel Qader (student), Ahmed
Humeid (n/a), Ammar Quttaineh (stockbroker), Nesreen Rafeeq (self-employed), Alabbas
Saed (teacher), Jafar Safwan (student), Omar
Saleh (telecom engineer), Ghassan Salti (n/a),
67
Bashar Sharaf (freelance filmmaker), Hamza
Soufan (student), Najah Taffal (artist, teacher
at deaf women clubs), Amr Toukhy (commercials production), Rawan Zeine (public relations consultant), Rabee Zureikat (advertising
executive), Sima Zureikat (writer and editor).
Collective films: Death by Chocolate (2004, 4',
Mini DV) (AFC Class of May 04), My Name
Is Mohamed (2008, 10') (Rania Okla, Yacoub
Haddad, Baan S. Shibab, Sinan Najm Abdullah, Yahya T. Hassan), Ya Halawood (2008,
10') (Nadia Odeh, Fathi Hueimel, Rabee Zureikat, Suhayb Jaaraat, Qusai Oshibat, Osama
Oshibat).
Amrallah, Massoud. Emirati filmmaker.
Born in 1967, he obtained a diploma in communication at the University of the Emirati
and then studied filmmaking in the United
States in 1988. He wrote a number of dramas
and documentaries for television. He is also a
poet and writer and one of the organizers of
the Gulf States Film Festival and the Dubai
International Film Festival.
Amro, Hind. Emirati filmmaker. Short documentary film: Dream of Masafi (2004, 22', Beta
SP).
AMROUCHE, NASSIM. Jordanian filmmaker. Feature film: Goodbye Gary / Adieu Gary
(2009, 75', 35mm).
Andoni, Raed. Palestinian filmmaker. As an
independent producer he set up his own company, Dar Films, in 1999. Documentary: Improvisation, Samir and His Brothers / Improvisation, Samir et ses frres / Irtijal (2005, 57',
Beta SP).
Andoni, Saed. Palestinian filmmaker. Born in
1972 in Bethlehem, he studied filmmaking at
Goldsmiths College in London, and worked
as a documentary film editor. Short films: Jamal, a Tale of Courage / Jamal, une histoire de
courage / Jamal, qissa shujaa (2000), Number
Zero / Numro zro / Ala sifr (2002, 27', Beta
SP), The Last Frontier / La dernire frontire /
al-Hudud al-akhira (2002, 32', Beta SP), Ertijal
(2005, 60', Beta SP).
68
Annadawi, Nizar. Iraqi filmmaker. Short documentary film: Out of the Frame (2008, 22').
Anzur, Ismal. Syrian pioneer filmmaker.
His sole film, the first silent feature to be made
in Syria, was a financial disaster, since it coincided with the first Egyptian sound films.
He subsequently worked very successfully in
television. His son, Najdat Ismal Anzur, has
directed one of Jordans few feature films. Feature film: Under the Skies of Damascus / Sous
le ciel de Damas / Tahta sama Dimask (1931,
60', 35mm).
Anzur, Najdat Ismal. Jordanian filmmaker. Born in 1954 in Damascus, son of the
first Syrian director Ismal Anzur, he has lived
in Jordan since 1971. He has obtained Jordan
ian citizenship and worked there in television
production. Feature film: An Oriental Story
/ Une histoire orientale / Hikya sharqiyya
(1991, 75', 35mm).
Aoun, Chadi. Lebanese filmmaker. Short animated film: Ahawa (2002, 5').
Aractingi, Philippe. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in 1964 in Beirut, he studied at
the CLCF in Paris, graduating in 1984. He began working for Lebanese television in 1985,
shooting reports and documentaries on the
war in Lebanon, some of which were shown
internationally. He later moved to Paris, where
he has worked in television for many years. His
documentaries include A Year Already / Un
an dj (1986), Cannes 88 (1988), You Carry
on Living / On vit toujours (1988), Refugees in
South Beirut / Refugis Beyrouth-Est (1988),
The House of the Future / La maison du futur
(1989), Free Flight / Libre vol (1991, 18', Beta
SP), The Kadicha Valley / La valle de Kadicha
(1991), Living / Vivre (1991), Car Connection
(1991), The Bus / Lautobus (1991), Through the
Mothers Looks / Par le regard des mres (1992,
52', Beta SP), The Redeployed / Les Reconvertis
(1992), Beirut Today / Beyrouth aujourdhui
(1993, 13', video), Beirut of Stones and Memories / Beyrouth de pierres et de mmoires (1993,
18', Beta SP), The Child Acrobats Dream / Le
rve de lenfant acrobat (1997, 50', video). He

also made two fictional pieces for Canadian
television: Ramadan, Pyramid Guide / Ramadane, guide des pyramides (1993) and Jamal,
Petrol Seller / Jamal, le vendeur de gas-oil
(1993). Feature films: The Bus / Lautobus / Bosta (2005, 112', 35mm), Under the Bombs / Sous
les bombes / Taht al-qasef (2007, 98', 35mm).
Arasoughli, Alia. Palestinian filmaker. Born
in Acre, she grew up in Lebanon before moving to the United States. She has worked as
teacher of film and the sociology of culture,
organizer of events concerning film, and editor of the book Screens of Life: Critical Film
Writing from the Arab World. Short films:
Torn Life / Vie dchire / Hayat mumazzaqa
(1993, 23', video), This Is Not Living / Cest pas
une vie / Hay mish eishi (2001, 42', Beta SP),
Between Heaven and Earth / Entre ciel et terre /
Ma bayn al-sama wa al-ard (2003, 30', video),
A Testimony of Birth / Shahadat milad (2003,
17', video), Are We Supposed to Fly? / Bidna
ntir tayr?! (2005, 14', video), Stories from Behind the Wall (2006, 24'), After the Last Sky /
Baad al-samaaal-akhira (2007, 55', video), The
Clothesline (2006, 14', video).
Arbid, Danielle. Lebanese filmmaker.
Born in 1970 in Beirut, she studied literature
and journalism and worked as a French journalist for 5 years. She has lived in Paris since
the mid-1980s. She has made short fictional
films: Demolition / Dmolition / Raddem
(1998, 17', 35mm), The Trafficker / Le passeur
/ al-Maaddi (1999, 13', 35mm), The Foreign
Woman / Ltrangre / al-Ghariba (2002, 46',
35mm), Mutuality / La mutuelle / al-Naql (13');
and documentaries: Alone with the War / Seule
avec la guerre / Halat harb (2000, 58', Beta SP),
At the Borders / Aux frontires (2002, 60', Beta
SP), Living Room Conversation / Conversation
de salon (2002, 9', Beta SP). She has also been
involved with interactive art and video installations. She contributed two collaboratively
made videos, Airport 1 (40") and Starry Night
(45"), to the collective project Videos Under
Siege (DIFF 2008, 39', video). Feature films: In
the Battlefields / Dans les champs de bataille /
Maarik hob (2004, 90', 35mm), A Man Lost /
Un homme perdu (2007, 97', 35mm).
Arif, Farah Ibrahim. Saudi filmmaker. She
works as presenter on childrens television.
Short animated film: The Past Returns (2006,
15', DVD).
Arif, Sameer Ibrahim. Saudi filmmaker. He
work as an editor and animator in television.
Short films: Jeddahs Football Champions
Competition (2006, 16', DV Cam), Hard Way /
Tareeqa saaba (2006, 18', DVC Pro).
Arraf, Suha. Palestinian filmmaker. Lives in
Jerusalem, working as a journalist and filmmaker. Documentaries: Take My Sister and
Give Me Yours (1997), The Gypsy Quarters
(1998), End of the Line (1999), Fatima (2000),
Her Story / Qissatuha (2000), Holy Fire (2001),
The Cinder Keepers (2001), I Am Palestine
(2003, 16', Beta SP), Ramallah Short Cuts,
Summer 2001 (2003, 6') Good Morning Jerusalem / Bonjour, Jrusalem / Sabah al-kkatr ya
al-Quds (2004, 52'), Hard Ball (2006, 52').
Arsan, Ayham. Syrian filmmaker. Short fictional film: Behind the Faces / Derrire les visages (2005, 12', 35mm).
Arshi, Ahmed. Emirati filmmaker. Short
film: Al-Hamra Island in the Eyes of Emirati
Filmmakers (with Ahmed Zain, 2009, 25', HD
Cam).
Arya, Pranav. Emirati filmmaker. He studied
fictional film: Jane Doe (2004, 3', Mini DV).
Asaf, Ravin. Iraqi filmmaker. Feature film:
The Smell of Apples / Le parfum des pommes
(2008, 85').
Asfour, Georina. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short film: Neighbours (2008, 13').
Ashoor, Mohamed. Emirati filmmaker. Short
film: Zayed: Dignity and Originality (with Sameer Saeed, 2001, 36', Beta SP).
69
Ashour, Montiana Bahgat. Emirati filmmaker, Studied at the American University
of Sharjah. Short films Tarha (2006, 7', Mini
DV), Still Sukoon (2007, 2', Mini DV).
Asmar, Muna. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. She studied at Yarmouk University, and
works as graphic designer. Short films: A Rock
and a Hard Place (2003), A Couple and a Silver
Roof (with Sima Zureikat, 2003).
Assaf, Layla. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
into a Christian family in 1947 in Beirut, she
trained in a range of media (publicity, photography, journalism and film) in Sweden. She
made about a hundred documentaries from
1979, including Before the Catastrophe (with
Ragnau Hedlund, 1986, 52'), and shot the first
of several fictional films, Martyrs / Chouchada, for Swedish television in 1988. Feature
film: The Freedom Gang / Le gang de la libert
/ al-Sheikha (1994, 87', 35mm).
Assaf, Rifqi. Jordanian filmmaker and member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative.
He studied at the Applied Science University, Jordan, and works as director and writer.
Short films: The Last Patch (with Omar Saleh,
2006), Amman in Red (2006), The View (with
Hazim Bitar, 2008, 17').
Assaf, Roger. Lebanese filmmaker. A
major figure in Iraqi theatre, founder of the
Studio of Dramatic Art in Beirut and teacher
at the Fine Art Academy, he was active in the
theatre both before and after his sole feature
film, made with players from the Thatre al
Hakawati. Documentary: Sirhan and the Pipe
/ Sirhan wal-masoura (collective, 1973). Feature film: Maaraka / Maarak (1984, 120',
16mm blown up to 35mm).
Ataya, Abdullah. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied at the University of Sharjah. Short
fictional films: Forgotten Red Roses (2005, 14',
Mini DV), Show Off Shadow (2007, 3', video).
70
Ataya, Amina. Emirati filmmaker. Born in

Dubai, she studied at the University of Sharjah. Student film: Among the Clouds (2002, 15',
S-VHS). Short fictional films: Sadness Thief
(2004, 20', DV Cam), Silk Strings (2005, 35',
Mini DV), Always Happens in 16.9 (with Salwa
Mohammed, 2007, 11', Mini DV, in Egypt).
Ateek, Rehab Omar. Emirati filmmaker.
Short films: The Car or the Wife? (2000, 13',
DV Cam), Distant Lives (2001, 6', DV Cam),
Between Two Suns / Bain shamsain (2006, 18',
DV Cam).
Attalah, Muawia. Jordanian filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Espresso (2008, 7').
Attallah, Hanna Selim. Palestinian filmmaker. Short fictional film: The Shadow of Time /
Lombre du temps / Khayalat azmina (2000,
13').
Attieh, Rania. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Tripoli, Quiet / Trablos al-hada
(with Daniel Garda, 2009, 15').
Attieyeh, Ruba. Lebanese filmmaker. Ducumentary: Remembrance (2000, 37', Beta).
Awad, Abdullah. Saudi filmmaker. Short film:
Quran Light (2005, 1', Super 16).
Awadallah, Hala. Emirati filmmaker. Born in
Egypt, but brought up in the UAE. Short fictional film: Deep Sight (2004, 7', Mini DV).
since 1997. Documentaries: Lions / Asud

(2001, 10', video), Going for a Ride? / Mashiyyin? (2003, 15', video), 25 Kilometres / Chamsa
waashrun kilometer (2005, 15', video), The
Fourth Room / La quatrime chambre (2005,
25', video), Five Minutes from Home / A cinq
minutes de chez moi (2008, 52', video). Contributed Not Just At Sea (2' 56") to the collective film Summer 2006, Palestine (2006, 35',
Beta SP).
Ayache, Mohamed. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short documentary film: Oum Jaber / Um
Jaber (2000, 21', Beta SP).
Ayish, Samya. Emirati filmmaker. She was
born in 1983 in the United States, of Palestinian origin, and studied at the American
University of Sharjah. Short fictional films: A
Letter to a UN Official (2004, 12', Mini DV),
Dear Women ... (2004, 8', Mini DV), Prison of
Freedom (2005, 7', Minin DV).
Azar, George. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentary: Gaza Fixer (2007, 22', video).
Bachiri, Naima. Yemeni filmmaker. She lives
currently in Geneva. Documentary: Jewish,
Arab, Yemenite / Yahudi, arabi, yamani (1989,
52').
Bader, Kaltham. Emirati filmmaker. Studied
at Zayed University. Short film: Healthy Pregnancy (2003, 10', DV Cam).
Awjeh, Abdel Raheem. Lebanese filmmaker.

Short fictional film: Globalisation (2002, 3').
Bader, Nidhal. Bahraini filmmaker. Born in

1976, he works as an electrical engineer. Short
film: The Open Door (2007, 7', DVD), Coffee
Shops, Refused or Accepted (2007, 18', Hi-8).
Awwad, Gibril. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentaries: Berlin Trap / Pige Berlin / Berlin al-masida (1982), Good Morning, Beirut /
Bonjour, Beyrouth / Sabah al-khayr ya Bayrut
(1983).
Bader, Reem. Jordanian filmmaker and member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative.
She studied at the University of Dubai. Short
films: And Life Goes On / Et la vie continue
(2004), Civilisation 101 (2006).
Awwad, Nahad. Palestinian filmmaker. She

studied filmmaking in Canada and in Denmark and has worked in film and television
Badr, Layali. Palestinian filmmaker. Sister of

Liana Badr. Born in 1957 in Jerico, she wrote
books for children and ran a childrens the-
71
atre. After training in East Berlin, she worked

for childrens television in Syria and, since
1997, in Egypt. Short films, mostly for children: The Path to Palestine / Le chemin vers la
Palestine / al-Rariq ila Filastin (1985, 8', 16mm
animation), The Little Bride / al-Arusa al-bahira (1993, 30', video), The Riddle / al-Lughuz
(19894), A Planet All Our Own (1995), The
Fairy Tale Keys (1997).
Badri, Ayub. Syrian filmmaker. With a

group of friendsAhmed Tello, Mohamed
Elmradi and Rashid Jalalset up a production company to make the first Syrian film,
The Innocent Victim / Laccus innocent / alMuttaham al-bary (1928). Later, in the 1930s,
he directed Syrias second (silent) feature. Feature film: The Call of Duty / Lappel du devoir /
Nada al-wajeb (1937).
Badr, Liana. Palestinian filmmaker. Sister of

Layali Badr. Born in 1952 in Jerusalem, she
studied philosophy and psychology at Beirut
University. She worked as a journalist until the
1982 Israeli invasion, when she moved to Tunis. Later, she returned to Palestine to work for
the Palestinian Authority. She has also written several novels, three of which have been
translated into English: A Compass for the
Sunflower (1989), A Balcony over the Fakihani
(1993), and The Eye of the Mirror (1994). Documentaries: Fadwa, a Palestinian Poet / Fadwa,
une potesse de la Palestine / Fadwa, hikayat
shaira min Filastin (1999, 52', Beta SP), The
Olive Trees / Les oliviers / Zaytunat (2000, 37',
Beta SP), The Green Bird / Loiseau vert / al-Tir
al-akhdahar (2002, 50', Beta SP), Zaytounat /
Zaytounat (2002, 37'), Siege: A Writers Diary
/ Sige / Hisar Mudhakarat katiba (2003, 33',
Beta SP), The Gates Are Open, Sometimes! / Les
passages sont ouverts, parfois (2006, 42' Beta
SP). Contributed Football on a Thursday Afternoon (2' 08") to the collective film Summer
2006, Palestine (2006, 35', Beta SP).
Badri, Waleed Masood. Emirati filmmaker.

He studied at Dubai Mens College. Short film:
Brotherhood Takes a Friend or Two (with Tariq
al-Hashimi, 2006, 3', Mini DV).
Badr Khan, Salah al-Din. Palestinian filmmaker. Short film: Night Dream / Rve de nuit
/ Hilm layla (1946).
Badrakhan, Ahmed.* Egyptian filmmaker responsible for one of the first Iraqi feature films: Cairo-Baghdad / Le Caire-Bagdad /
Al-Kahira-Bagdad (1945).
Badrakhan, Salah.* Egyptian filmmaker responsible for one Lebanese feature:
Summer in Lebanon / Lt au Liban (1946,
35mm).
Bagdadi, Maroun. Lebanese filmmaker

(19511993). Born in 1951 in Beirut within a
Christian family, he first studied law and political science in Beirut, then filmmaking at
IDHEC in Paris. Back in Lebanon he made a
series of 16mm television reports for television.
After a pioneering first feature, he continued
to make television documentaries. Documentaries: Nine and a Half / Neuf et demi (1974,
television), Seven and a Half / Sept et demi
(1974, television), The South Is Doing Well, and
You? / Le Sud va bien, et vous? (1976), The Silent Majority / La majorit silencieuse (1976),
Kafr Kala (1976), Ninety / Quatre-vingt-dix
(1988), The Most Beautiful of Mothers / La plus
belle des mres (1978, 25', 16mm), We Are All
for the Homeland / Nous sommes tous pour la
patrie (1979), Story of a Village and of a War
/ Histoire dun village et dune guerre (1979),
Homage to Kamal Joumblat / Hommage Kamal Joumblat (1979), Murmurs / Murmures
(1980), Nostagia for a Land at War / Nostalgie
dune terre en guerre (1980, 25', 16mm), Follow the Road / Poursuivre la route (1982), New
Year Speech / Discours du nouvel an (1982),
The Reconstruction of the Commercial Centre / La reconstruction du centre commercial
(1983), War on War / Guerre sur guerre (1984).
In 1984 he settled in Paris, where he made
feature-length tlfilms: Lebanon, The Land
of Honey and Incense / Liban, Pays de miel et
de lencens / Loubnan balad al-assal wal bakhour (1987, 95', Super 16), Marat (1989, 90',
35mm), and Slowly Slowly in the Wind (1990).
72
He died in a mysterious accident on his return

to Beirut to shoot a new film in 1993. Feature
films: Beirut Oh Beirut / Beyrouth Beyrouth
/ Beirut ya Beirut (1975, 110', 35mm), Little
Wars / Petites guerres / Houroub saghira (1982,
108', 35mm), The Veiled Man / Lhomme voil
/ al-Rajul al-muhajjah (1987, 93', 35mm), The
Scarecrow / Lpouvantail (1990, 35mm), Outside Life / Hors la vie / Kharifj al-hayat (1990,
97', 35mm), The Girl from the Air / La fille de
lair (1992, 103', 35mm).
Bahri, Alfred. Lebanese filmmaker. Feature film: The Mute Man and Love / Le muet
et lamour / al-Akhrass wal hub (1967, 35mm).
Bakhet, Dalia. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
film: Affiliation (with Mahdi Ali Ali and Mahmoud Salem Be Ajajah, 2007, 9', Mini DV).
Bakri, Mohamed. Palestinian filmmaker.
Born in 1953 in Bina Village, Galilee (Israel),
he studied at the University of Tel-Aviv and
worked as stage and screen actor. He appeared
in numerous international feature films: Costa-Gavrass Hannah K (1983, France), Uri Barbashs Beyond the Walls (1984, Israel), Amos
Gitais Esther (1986, Israel), Erik Clausens
Rami og Julie (1988, Denmark), Isadore Musallams Foreign Nights (1989, Canada), Eran
Rikliss Cup Final (1991, Israel), Uri Barbashs
Beyond the Walls II (1992, Israel), Michel Kleifis The Tale of Three Jewels (1994, Palestine),
Ali Nassars The Milky Way (1994, Palestine),
Rachida Krims Sous les pieds des femmes
(1995, France), Rashid Masharawis Haifa
(1996, Palestine), Benny Toratys Desperado
Square (1997, Italy), Hannah Eliass The Olive
Harvest (2001, Palestine), Saverio Costanzos
Private (2004, Italy), Paolo and Vittorio Tavianis The Lark Farm (2007, Italy), and Rashid
Mashawaras Leilas Birthday (2008, Palestine).
Feature-length documentaries: 1948 (1998,
54', Beta SP), Jenin, Jenin / Jnine, Jnine / Jenin, Jenin (2002, 54', Beta SP), Since You Left /
Depuis que tu nes plus l / Min youm ma ruhat
(2006, 58', DV Cam).
Balwai, Riyadh. Bahraini filmmaker. Short
film: The Devils Lake (2005, 16', DVD).
Bani, Abbas. Iraqi filmmaker. Short animated film: Beirut Summer 82 / Beyrouth t 82
(1985, 10', 35mm).
Barakat, Henri.* Egyptian director of
several Lebanese feature films in the 1960s
and 1970s: Safar Barlek / Safar Barlek (1967),
The Watchmans Daughter / La fille du gardien
/ Bint al-hares (1968), The Visitor / La visiteuse
(1972), My Darling / Ma chrie (1973), and The
Best Days of My Life / Les plus beaux jours de
ma vie (1973).
Barakat, Ray. Lebanese filmmaker. Studied at
ALBA. Short fictional film: Visions (2000, 15').
Barakat, Sheila. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1968 in Beirut, she graduated from the Fine
Art Academy in Beirut in 1992 and from FEMIS in Paris in 1994, where her graduation
film was Miro (1994). Short fictional film: Letter from Nabil / La lettre de Nabil / Risala min
Nabil (1995, 21', 35mm).
Barakat, Yahya. Palestinian filmmaker.
Films: The Path of Struggle / Le chemin de
la lutte / Masira al-nidal (1981), Abu Salma
(1982), Days of Cooperation / Jours de la coopration / al-Ayyam al-mushtaraka (1989),
Rimal al-Sawafi (1991), In Gods House / Dans
la maison de dieu / Fi bayt Allah (2003, 42'),
Rachel: An American Conscience (2005).
Barrak, Rima. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
film: The Land of 48 / al-Ard al-48 (2003).
Bassem, Hiba. Iraqi filmmaker. She studied at
the Independent Film and Television Academy in Baghdad. Her second documentary was
made for Al Jazeera International. Short documentary films: Baghdad Days / Jours de Bagdad (2005, 35', video), Thinking About Leaving
(2007, 10').
Bassile, Raymond. Lebanese filmmaker. He
studied at the London International Film
School and made reports from Lebanon and
some short documentaries for the German
television company ZDF. He has also worked
as assistant to Borhan Alawiya and Maroun
Bagdadi. Documentary: For Better and Worse
/ Pour le meilleur et pour le pire (1997, 54',
video).
Bastaki, Abdallah. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied at Abu Dhabi Mens College. Short
documentary films: Kalba: Harmless Contradictions (2004, 3', Mini DV), Facing the Inevitable (with Nayef al-Mansouri, 2005, 25', Mini
DV), Etisalats Role in the Advancements of the
UAE (2005, 5', Mini DV), To Whom Belongs
the Kingdom This Day? (2005, 10', Beta SP).
Bayous, Ghassan. Syrian filmmaker. Documentaries: Liberation / La libration / alTahrir (1972), Exhibition on the October War
/ Exposition sur la guerre doctobre (1974), The
New Nazism / Le nouveau nazisme (1974).
Baz, Tina. Lebanese filmmaker. Contributed
three collaboratively made videos, Airport 1
(40"), Starry Night (45"), and Beirut Ground
Zero (1'), to the collective project Videos Under
Siege (DIFF 2008, 39', video).
Bazaid, Mohammad. Saudi filmmaker. Also
journalist. Short fictional film: Last Piece
(2005, 5', Mini DV).
Behbehani, Sadeq Hussain. Kuwaiti filmmaker. Studied at the Theater Arts Institute
in Kuwait. Short film: When? (2007, 18', Mini
DV).
Belaid, Sofiane. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
film: Sarkha (1997, 18', video).
Belyouha, Salem. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied at Dubai Mens College. Short documentary film: The Future of Fitness (2001, 6',
Beta SP).
Ben Hirsi, Bader. Yemeni filmmaker.
Born in 1968 in London of Yemeni descent, he
studied at Goldsmithss College, University of
London. He continues to live and work in London. In 2000, he made a first 74 minute video
documentary about his meeting with Tim
Mackintosh-Smith, author of Yemen: Journeys
to the Land of the Dictionary, and their joint
exploration of Yemen. He has since made a
further documentary, A Girls School at Taiz
73
(2002), a Channel 4 television series, Hadj: The
Greatest Pilgrimage on Earth and a fictional
feature. Feature films: The English Sheikh and
the Yemeni Gentleman / Le cheikh anglais et le
gentleman ymnite (2000, 74', Beta SP) (doc
umentary), A New Day in Old Sanaa / Un
jour nouveau dans le vieux Sanaa (2005, 86',
35mm).
Bezjian, Nigol. Lebanese filmmaker. He
has made a docudrama: The Apricot Path / Le
Chemin des abricots (2001, 35', Beta SP), and a
documentary: Verve / Avivn (2002, 15'). Feature-length documentaries: Muron (2003, 90',
Beta SP), Ayroum (2005).
Bin Amro, Manal Ali. Emirati filmmaker.
She studied mass communications at UAE
University. Short films: Shoes (2006, 6', Mini
DV), Stuck Face (2007, 6', Mini DV).
Bin Fahad, Maryam. Emirati filmmaker.
She studied at Dubai Womens College and
subsequently at Leeds Metropolitan UniversityNorthern Film School in the United
Kingdom. Student films: Lifeless (2002, 5',
DigiBeta), Are They Forgotten? (2002, 6', DV
Cam). Short films in the United Kingdom:
Into the Unknown (2004, 46', DV Cam), and
in the UAE: What Is after the Explosion (with
Khalid Ahmed al-Hammadi, 2004, 39', DV
Cam), Tough Moments (2004, 7', DV Cam).
Bin Fahad, Nahla. Emirati filmmaker. Studied graphic design at the Abu Dhabi Womens
College. Directed about 15 commercials. Short
films: The Nations Beloved (2003, 36', DV
Cam), Thousand Miles (2004, 5', Beta Cam.
Bin Hafez, Moath. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied at Dubai Mens College. Student films:
Suicidal Thoughts (2005, 14', Mini DV), Nothing (2006, 4', DV Cam), On the Line (2007, 13',
Mini DV), Inequity (2007, 10', DV Cam).
Bin Haider, Hussain. Emirati filmmaker.
Short film: The Roots (2001, 8', DigiBeta).
Bin Owqad, Maitha Mohammed. Emirati
filmmaker. She studied at Dubai Womens Col-
74
lege. Short film: Road Victim (2006, 1', Mini

DV).
Bokhary, Lina. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentary: Flood / Dluge / Fayd (2002).
Bin Sougat, Mohammed Abdulla. Emirati

filmmaker. He studied at Dubai Mens College.
Short films: A Foot Behind (2006, 6', DV Cam),
Do You Believe in Magic (2006, 15', DVD).
Bolooki, Ahmed Abdul Majeed. Emirati

filmmaker. He studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short fictional film: Close
Your Eyes (2004, 16', Mini DV).
Bishara, Amahl. Palestinian filmmaker. Short

film: Across Oceans, among Neighbours (2002).
Boulghourjian, Vatche. Lebanese filmmaker.

Short film: Ali the Iraqi (2008, 22').
Bitar, Hazim. Jordanian filmmaker. Born in

1964 in Saudi Arabia of Palestinian/Jordanian
descent, he has Jordanian and U.S. citizenship.
Brought up in Saudi Arabia, he studied IT at
Millersville University in Pennsylvania and
management at George Washington University, Washington, D.C. On his move to Amman, Jordan, in 2003, he founded the Amman
Filmmakers Cooperative and the Jordanian
Short Film Festival. Short documentary films:
Uncivil Liberties: Secret Trials in America
(2000, 30', videoin the United States), Jerusalems High Cost of Living (2002, 53', video),
Girls Education Under Siege in Hebron (2003,
5'), Teaching Heyam: Girls Education in Rural Syria (2003, 12'), JRF and Communities
of Hope (2004, 13'), Growing Up in Ammans
Suburbia (2006, 9'), Sharar (with Ammar Quttaineh and Saleh Kasem, 2006, 17', Beta SP),
What a Job / Quel boulot (with Omar Saleh
and Mohamed Aboujarad, 2006, 12', DV
Cam), Three Eyes (with Rawan Zeine, 2007, 5'),
Not My Turn (with Rabee Zureikat, 2008, 6'),
and a short fictional film: The View (with Rifqi
Assaf, 2008, 17').
Bourjeily, Lucien. Lebanese filmmaker. Born

in 1980 in Lebanon. Short film: Under the Vine
Tree / Sous la vigne / Tahta al-aricha (2008, 9',
Beta SP).
Bitrawi, Walid. Palestinian filmmaker. Short

film: And the Walled Enclosure / Wa mahuta bi
an-aswar (1998).
Bizri, Hicham. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1966 at Sada, he studied filmmaking in Boston and New York, where he is now based. He
has worked as assistant director, notably to
Raoul Ruiz. Short films and documentaries:
The Ludicrous Man / Lhomme ridicule (1989),
One Day / Un jour (1990), Cypress Leaves / Les
feuilles du cyprs (1990), Message from a Dead
Man / Message dun homme mort (1992, documentary, 47', 16mm).
Boushahri, Abdullah. Kuwaiti filmmaker. Born in 1979 in Kuwait, he studied at

Florida Atlantic University. Short films and
documentaries: Boiling Over (2002), Akthar
(2003), Death of the Doll (2003), Tow Away
Zone (2003), Kuwaiti Champion (2004, 20',
Beta SP), Deserted (2006, 6', HDV). Featurelength documentary: Losing Ahmad / En perdant Ahmad (2006, 68', Mini DV).
Boustany, Karam. Lebanese pioneer
filmmaker. Co-directed the first Lebanese
sound feature. Feature film: In the Ruins of
Baalbeck / Dans les ruines de Baalbeck / Bayn
hayakel Baalbeck (with Julio De Luca, 1933,
35mm).
Boutros, Raymond. Syrian filmmaker.
Born in 1950 in Hama, he studied filmmaking
at the University of Kiev, graduating in 1976.
Made a number of short documentary films:
Ordinary Zionism / Le sionisme ordinaire /
Subyniya diya (1974), When the South Wind
Blows / Lorsque souffle le vent du sud / Indama tabubbu rh al-Janb (1976), The Witness
/ Le tmoin / al-Shahd (1986, 20'), Whispers
/ Chuchotements (1999, 30', 35mm). Feature
films: The Greedy Ones / Les gourmands a.k.a.
Les algues deau douce / al-Tahalib (1991, 90',
35mm), The Displacement / Le dplacement /
al-Tarhaj (1997, 120', 35mm), Hasiba (2008,
135').
Brche, Bass. Lebanese filmmaker. He was
born in 1978 in Lebanon, where he studied
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drama, before moving to England to study

film. He also worked as a film actor. Short
film: Both / Ala atabah (2007, 11', 35mm).
(1985, 23'), and a number of tlfilms. He has

taught film analysis at the University of Damascus.
Bu-Ali, Mohammed Rashed. Bahraini filmmaker. Born in 1984 in Bahrain. Short films:
Betwixt Them (2006, 33', Mini DV), From the
West (2006, 9', Mini DV), Absence / Ghiyab
(2008, 10', Beta).
Chabaane, Mahmoud. Syrian filmmaker. He

studied filmmaking in Moscow and subsequently worked as a documentary filmmaker
for Syrian television. Documentary: Message
of Love for Syria / Message damour pour la Syrie (with Hadar Yaziji, 1992, 38').
Buchakjian, Gregory. Lebanese filmmaker.

Contributed What, Shoes? (2') to the collective
project Videos Under Siege (DIFF 2008, 39',
video).
Bukhamas, Yousef. Emirati filmmaker. Short
fictional films: Discerning Memory (with Razan Takash, 2006, 10', Mini DV), The Jumeira
Job (2007, 15', Mini DV).
Bunni, Amin. Syrian filmmaker. He studied filmmaking at IDHEC in Paris and then
worked in Syrian television from 1968. Medium-length fiction: To the Last Man / Au
dernier homme / Hata al-rajoul al-akhir (1972,
50'). He made a number of documentaries, including Lessons in Civilisation / Leons de civilisation / Durusum fi-l hadhra (1973, 38'),
Palestine: The Roots / Palestine, les racines
(1973, 43'), Quneitra, My Love / Quneitra, mon
amour/ Quneitra habbibaty (1974, 20'). Director of the second channel of Syrian television
from 1992. Feature film: Palestinian Memories
/ Mmoires palestiniennes (1991, 70', 16mm).
Bustan, Sahar. Emirati filmmaker. Born in
1982 in Saudi Arabia and studied at American University of Sharjah. Short fictional film:
Trilogy (2004, 6', Mini DV).
Cabral, Drina. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at the American University of Sharjah.
Short fictional films: Intentionally Untrue
(2004, 21', Mini DV), Crimson of Regret (2004,
8', Mini DV).
Chaar, Ala-Eddine. Syrian filmmaker. He
studied filmmaking in Moscow and subsequently made a number of documentaries, including The Exiled Willow Tree / Le saule exil
Chabaane, Youssef. Palestinian filmmaker.

He made one feature film, The Road / La route
/ al-Tariq (1973) in Libya.
Chahadat, Houssam. Syrian filmmaker. Born
in 1966 in Syria, he studied film and television at the Munich Film Academy and acting
at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Damascus. Short films: Sunkiss (1994), The Wedding
(1998), Scheherezades Daughters / Les filles de
Schehrzade (2000, 38', video), If Life Becomes
Cinema (2000), Just Get Married! (2003, 20',
Beta SP).
Chahal-Sabbag, Randa. Lebanese
filmmaker. Born in 1953 in Tripoli, with an
Iraqi Christian mother and a Lebanese Muslim father, she studied in Paris, directing at
the Universit de Vincennes Paris VIII and
filmmaking at the cole de Vaugirard. She was
based in Paris from 1982. Her feature film, The
Kite, won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film
Festival. She died in 2008. She made a number
of film and video documentaries: Little Steps /
Pas pas / Khutwatin (1976, 110', 16mm), The
Lebanon of Old / Liban dautrefois / Lubnan
zaman (1982, 10', 16mm), Half Past Nine / 9
heures 30 (30 x 10 minutes television series)
(1982), Shaykh Imam / Shaykh Imam (1984),
Our Imprudent Wars / Nos guerres imprudents
/ Hurubina al-taisha (1995, 52', Beta SP), and
Souha, Surviving in Hell / Souha, survivre
lenfer (2000, 57', Beta SP). She directed a tlfilm: The Infidels / Les infidles (1997, 86').
Feature films: Screens of Sand / crans de sable
/ Shash min al-raml (1991, 80', 35mm), The Civilised / Civilises / al-Moutahaddirat (1998,
95', 35mm), The Kite / Le cerf-volant / Tayyara
min waraq (2003, 80', 35mm).
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Chahine, Carlos. Lebanese filmmaker. Lebanese-French film actor. Short film: The North
Road / La route du nord (2008, 25', 35mm).
Chahine, Elias. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
documentary films: The Man Walking on the
Other Side of the Street / Lhomme qui marche
sur lautre ct de la rue (2000, 27').
Chahine, Youssef.* Egyptian filmmaker
who directed two Lebanese produced features
(the second shot on location in Spain) in the
1960s: The Seller of Rings / Le vendeur de bagues / Biya al-khawatim (1965) and Golden
Sands / Sables dor / Rimal min thaheb (1967).
Chamchoum, Georges. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in 1946 in Niger, he studied at the
CLCF in Paris. He produced Oumarou Gandas Saitane in 1972 in Niger and published a
review, Film, in Syria in 1974. He began with
a short film, Inside-Out (1969), and made
documentaries after his sole fictional feature,
including Lebanon, Why? / Liban, pourquoi? /
Loubnan limaza (1977, 35mm). Feature film:
Salam After Death / Salam aprs la mort /
Salam baad al-mawt (1971, 100', 35mm).
Chammas, Andr. Lebanese filmmaker. He
studied at Fine Art Intitute in Beirut. Short
film: Wayn Yo? (1998, 15', video).
Chammout, Ismal. Palestinian filmmaker.
Also a painter. Documentaries about Palestine: Youth Camps / Camps des jeunes /
Muaskinat al-shebab (1972, 15', 16mm), Memories and Fire / Souvenirs et feu / Zikriyyat wa
nar (1972, 20', 16mm), The Urgent Call / Lappel
urgent / an-Nida al-milah (1973, 7', 35mm),
On the Road to Palestine / Sur le chemin de la
Palestine / Ala tarik filistin (1974, 20', 35mm),
Tell al-Zaatar (1976).
Chamoun, Jean. Lebanese filmmaker.
Husband of the Palestinian documentarist,
Ma Masri. Born in 1944, he studied drama
at the University of Lebanon and filmmaking
at the Universit Paris VIII. He participated
in the collective film Tel al-Zatar (with Mus-
tafa Abu Ali and Pino Adriano, 1977), about

a beseiged Palestinian camp, and later made
Hymn for Freedom / La cantique des hommes
libres / Anshuda al-ahrar (1979). He subsequently collaborated on a series of documentaries with Ma Masri: Under the Rubble /
Sous les dcombres / Tahatal ankad (1983, 48',
16mm), Wild Flowers: Women of South Lebanon / Fleurs dajonc: Femmes du Sud du Liban
/ Zahrat el koundoul (1986, 71', 16mm), War
GenerationBeirut / Beyrouth, la gnration
de la guerre (1988, 52', 16mm), Children of Fire
/ Les enfants du feu / Atfl jabal al nr (1990,
50', 16mm), Suspended Dreams / Rves suspendus / Ahlam muallaqa (1992, 52', Beta SP),
Hanan Ashwari / Hanan Ashwari: femme de
son temps (1995), Children of Shatila / Les enfants de chatilla (1998, 47', Beta SP), Frontiers
of Dreams and Fears / Frontires du rve et de
la peur / Ahlam al-manfa (2001, 56', video), The
Magic Lantern / La lanterne magique (2003),
Comedy in the Line of Fire / Sourire en flamme
(2006), Reviving Memory / La mmoire renaissante (2006). He returned to solo filmmaking
with Hostage of Time / Lotage de lattente a.k.a.
Lotage du temps / Rahinat el-intizar (1994, 50',
16mm), Facing the Destruction / En face de la
destruction / Ma adhan fi wjh aal-dammar
(1999), Land of Women / Terre de femmes / Ard
ennissa (2004, 58', DV Cam). Feature film: In
the Shadows of the City / Lombre de la ville /
Taif al-madina (2000, 100', 35mm).
Chams, Hassib. Lebanese filmmaker. Feature film: Abou Selim in the City / Abou Slim
en ville (1963, 35mm).
Charaf, Wissam. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Hizz ya wizz (2004, 26', 35mm).
Charafeddine, Fouad. Lebanese filmmaker and actor. Brother of Youssef. Feature
film: The Cry / Le cri / al-Sarkha (1991, 35mm).
Charafeddine, Youssef. Lebanese
filmmaker. Brother of Fouad. Feature films:
The Last Passage / Le dernier passage / alMamar al-akhir (1981, 35mm), The Decision
/ La dcision / al-Karar (1981, 35mm), The
Last Night / La dernire nuit / al-Layl alakhir (1982, 35mm), The Death Leap / Le saut
de la mort / Kafzat al-mawt (1982, 35mm),
Rendezvous with Love / Rendez-vous avec
lamour / Moad maa al-hub (1982, 35mm), Mr.
Risk-Everything / Monsieur risque-tout a.k.a.
Tmraire / al-Moujazef (1983, 35mm), My
Eternal Love / Mon amour ternel a.k.a. Mon
imprissable amour / Houbi lazi la yamout
(1984, 35mm), The Vision / La vision / alRouya (1985, 35mm), The Woman Thief / La
voleuse / al-Sarika (1991, 35mm).
Charara, Walid. Lebanese filmmaker.
Feature-length documentary: We Shall Return
One Day / Nous retournerons un jour (with
Samir Abdallah, 1998, 90', video).
Chawkat, Seif-Eddine.* Egyptian filmmaker who directed a number of Syrian features in the 1960s and 1970s. Feature films:
Love in Constantinople / Amour Constantinople (1967, 35mm), Operations at 6 Oclock
/ Oprations six heures / amalyat al-saa 6
(1969, 90', 35mm), Mexico Trip / Des aventures
comiques au Mexique (1972, 105', 35mm),
Memories of a Night of Love / Souvenirs dune
nuit damour (1973, 35mm), The Beauty and
the Four Looks / La belle et les quatre regards
(1975, 35mm), Official Mission / Mission officielle (1975, 35mm), Arrivals from the Sea / Les
arrivants par la mer (1977, 35mm).
Chawqi, Khahil. Iraqi filmmaker. Born
in 1924 in Baghdad, he studied there at the
Academy of Fine Arts and became one of the
major actors in the national theatre. He made
a number of film appearances, his best-known
role being in Mohamed Choukri Jamils The
Thirsty Ones / Les assoiffs / al-Damiun (1972).
He also worked in television and directed just
one film for cinema release. Feature film: The
Night Watchman / Le veilleur de nuit / al-Haris
(1968, 90', 35mm).
Chlatt, Alias. Iraqi filmmaker. Short films on
the struggle in Palestine, both fictionalThe
Beginning / Le commencement / al-Bidaya
(1969), The Commandos / Les commandos /
al-Khtaib (1969)and documentaryFire
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Doesnt Destroy the Childrens Dolls / Le feu
ne dtruit pas les poupes des enfants / al-Neiran la taakol luaeb el Atfl (1973).
Chotin, Andr.* Born in 1898, he was the
French director of a bedouin drama shot in
Iraq before Iraqi production got under way. He
died in 1954. Feature film: Alia and Issa / Alia
et Issa / Alya wa Issa (1948, 32', 35mm).
Chouaib, Jihane. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1972 in Beirut, she left with her family for
Mexico before arriving in France while still
an adolescent. She studied philosophy before
turning to filmmaking. Short fictional films:
The Chandeliers / Les lustrales (with Lionel
Delplanque, 1996), Otto or The Jams / Otto ou
les confitures (2000), Under My Bed / Sous mon
lit (2004, 44', 35mm).
Choucair, Cynthia. Lebanese filmmaker.
Born in 1975 in Lebanon, she studied at ALBA
and IESAV in Beirut. She has worked on many
films and television programs. Short films:
Anonyms (1998), El Haouch (1998), Des choux
et des chous? (2000), The Chair / La chaise
/ al-Kursi (2002, 22', 16mm), Travel / Safar
(with Dimitri Khadr, 2003, 28', DV Cam), Elie
Feyrouz (2003).
Codsi, Jean-Claude. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in 1948 in Beirut, he studied at INSAS
in Belgium and served as assistant to Borhan
Alawiya on Kafr Kassem (1974). His diploma
film at INSAS was the documentary: The Tap
/ Le robinet / al-Hanafiyah (1971). He contributed Coffee and Cigarettes (3') to the collective
film Summer 2006, Palestine (2006, 35', Beta
SP). Feature film: The Story of a Return a.k.a.
A Time Has Come / Histoire dun retour a.k.a.
Il est temps / Ana al-awan (1994, 83', 35mm).
Copty, Fady. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
film: Alienation (2007, 8').
Dabague, Christine. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in 1959 in Beirut, she studied
philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and filmmaking at Hunter College in New York. She
78
worked for 10 years in various production

roles in the film industry and produced ten
films. She also wrote short stories and made
a number of films, both documentaries: Bernt
Naber (1990), Fields, the Anatomy of Morning (1991, 15', 16mm), Ceausescu (1993), and a
short fictional film: The First Night / La premire nuit (1993). Feature film: Zeinab and the
River / Zeinab et le fleuve / Zaynab wa al-nahr
(1997, 80', 35mm).
Dabis, Cherien. Palestinian filmmaker.
Born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1976, she grew
up in the United States and Jordan. She studied filmmaking at Columbia University, New
York, and worked as a scriptwriter. Short film:
Make a Wish / Atmenah (2006, 12', 35mm).
Feature film: Amerrika / Amreeka (2009, 110',
35mm).
Daffar, Hayder Mousa. Iraqi filmmaker. Documentary feature film: The Dreams of
Sparrows / Rves de moineaux (2005, 72', Beta
SP).
Dagher, Ely. Lebanese filmmaker. Short animated film: Beirut (2005, 5').
Damen, Rawan. Palestinian filmmaker. Studied mass communications at Leeds University
in the UK. Short film: Waiting for Light (2000).
Damuni, Nicolas. Palestinian filmmaker.
Based in France. Short film: Returning Alone
/ Un seul retour / Awda wahida (2002, 10' Beta
SP).
Daou, Souad. Emirati filmmaker. Born in
1986 in the UAE, she studied at the American
University of Sharjah. Short film: Even-Out
(2006, 3', Mini DV).
Daoud, Hikmat. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
film: The Beginning of Memory / Le dbut de
la mmoire / Ibda fi al-dhakira (1983).
Daoud, Iyad. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
films: The Agony ... Dayr Yassin / Dayr Yassin,
zamn al-waf (1998), Jerusalem, the Promised
of Heaven / al-Quds waad al-sama (1999).
Darwaza, Nazih. Palestinian filmmaker.

Documentary: Palestinian Diaries (with Abdel Salam Shehada and Suheir Ismal, 1992,
52', Beta SP).
Darwaza, Sawsan. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short films: Artists Speak Out / Maia fannanun yaqulun (2000), The Square / al-Murabba
(2003).
Darwish, Ziad. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
films: Still on the Land (1989, 25'), The Peoples
Intifada / Intifada shaab (1991), Bayt Sahhur,
City of Resistance / Bayt Sahhur madina alsamud (1992), Defiance / Murda (1992, 19').
Daw, Salim. Palestinian filmmaker. Short and
documentary films: Keys / Mafateeh (2003),
Mafateeh (2006, 60').
Dayoub, Mohamed Youssef. Syrian filmmaker whose experimental videos have been
made in the UAE. He studied at the Fine Art
College of Damascus University. Short films:
Colour from the UAE (2002, 13', DV Cam),
Dallah (2005, 3', Mini DV), Forming (2005, 4',
Mini DV), Wind Drugget (2005, 7', Mini DV),
To Moustapha Akkad: War and Peace (2006,
6', Mini DV), Coal and Water (2006, 4', Mini
DV), Spectrums (2008, 4', DVD).
De Luca, Julio. Lebanese pioneer filmmaker. Co-directed the first Lebanese sound
film in 1933. Feature film: In the Ruins of Baalbeck / Dans les ruines de Baalbeck / Bayn hayakel Baalbeck (with Karam Boustany, 1933,
35mm).
Debs, Jacques. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1957 in Beirut, he graduated from the Moscow
film school VGIK in 1981. Documentaries:
Central Asia / LAsie centrale (1991), The Trophy War / La guerre des trophes (1992), Goodbye Bakou / Adieu Bakou (1994, 52', Beta SP),
European Muslims, Oriental Christians / Musulmans dEurope, chrtiens dOrient. a.k.a.
Miroirs briss (2006, 135').
Deed, Wael. Lebanese filmmaker. Documentary: Faces Hanging on the Wall / Visages colls
au mur (2006, 42', video).
Dehni, Salah. Syrian filmmaker. Also
film critic and historian, as well as novelist.
Born in 1925, he abandoned his medical training to study filmmaking at IDHEC in Paris.
Back in Syria, he worked as a journalist for
various newspapers and for Radio Damascus.
He made six documentaries between 1961 and
1978, including Water and Drought / Eau et
scheresse / al-Mu wa al-jafaf (1961), Arab
Antiquity / Lantiquit arabe / al-Athar al-arabiya (1962), Syrian Glass / Le verre syrien / alZujaj al-suri (1966), The Flower of Golan / La
fleur du Golan / Zahratu al-julan (1974, 20'),
Ibn al-Nafis (1978, 22' + 11'). After completing
his only feature film, he turned to film criticism and wrote a novel, The Salt of the Earth,
and several books on the cinema. Feature film:
Heroes Are Born Twice / Les hros naissent
deux fois / al-Abtal yuadun marrayayn (1977,
110', 35mm).
Deis, Riyad. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
film: The Matchbox / al-Kibrita (2004), Easy
Easy / Swesh Swesh (2008, 22'). Contributed
Janan (1' 50") to the collective film Summer
Der-Ghougassian, Hagop. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in 1970 in Beirut, he studied at
IESAV in Beirut and worked as reporter for
Lebanese television. He also worked as an actor. Short fictional film: Yva (1993, 26', Super
VHS).
Deyoub, Ali. Syrian filmmaker. Short fictional film: Tarab (2006, 4').
Dhiaddine, Mohamed. Syrian filmmaker. Feature film: Muse and Amber / Muse
et ambres (1973, 35mm).
Diab, Ala. Jordanian filmmaker and member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative.
Studied architecture at the University of Jordan, and works as a graphic designer. Short
film: True Italian . . . True Italian Car (with
Yazan Doughan, 2003).
Dib, Rolly. Lebanese filmmaker. Short film:
Casting (2000, 13', video).
79
Dibs, Jasim Bou. Emirati filmmaker. Short
fictional film: The Neighbour (1993, 17', Beta
SP).
Dirbas, Sahera. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
documentary film: Stranger in My Home Jerusalem (2007, 37').
Dora, Amin. Lebanese filmmaker. Short animated film: Greyscale (2003, 5').
Doueiri, Ziad. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1963, he lived in Lebanon for 20 years and
then went to study filmmaking in the United
States, first at the University of San Diego,
then at UCLA. Trained as a cameraman, he
worked as assistant cameraman on all Quentin Tarantinos early films. He divides his life
between France and the United States. Feature
film: West Beyrouth / Beyrouth al-gharbiya
(1998, 100', 35mm), Lila Says That / Lila dit a
(2004, 89').
Doughan, Yazan. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. Studied architecture at the University of
Jordan. Short film: True Italian Man ... True
Italian Car (with Ala Diab, 2003).
Durra, Zeina. Palestinian filmmaker. Born
in 1976 in London of Palestinian parents.
She studied in Oxford and New York, with a
masters in film from the Tisch School of Arts,
where she made her thesis film. Short film: The
Seventh Dog / Sabee kaleb (2005, 21', 35mm).
Dweik, Bara Fakhri. Emirati filmmaker. She
studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short fictional film: The Pain of Being Jane
(2004, 6', Mini DV).
Ebrahim, Maitha. Emirati filmmaker. She
films: Adolescent Colors (with Wafa Faisal,
Nada Salem, Hana Abdullah Mohammed alMulla al-Muhairi, Heba al-Dhanhani 2005,
28', DV Cam), The Scar (2005, 13', Mini DV),
A Roof Over Our Heads (2005, 10', Mini DV),
Funky Hair Style (2007, 7', DigiBeta).
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Eid, De Gaulle. Lebanese filmmaker. Born

in 1970 in Edbel in Lebanon, he has lived in
France since 1990. He studied filmmaking at
the University of Aix-en-Provence and then
worked as assistant director to Jean-Daniel
Pollet in 1994 and to Youssef Chahine for a
number of films beginning with Fate / Le destin (1977). Short documentary film: Accursed
Exile / Maudit soit lexil (2002, 52', Beta SP).
Eid, Rana. Lebanese filmmaker. She studied
audio-visual media in Beirut. Short films: Kamal Joumblatt (1998), Letter to a Palestinian
Friend / Lettre un ami palestinien (1999).
El Asmar, Rouba. Lebanese filmmaker. Studied at IESAV. Short fictional film: Rehearsal /
Rptition (2000, 12').
El Bakri, Yassine. Iraqi filmmaker. Short
fictional film adapted from a Ghassan Kanafani story: The Plum Tree Flower / La fleur de
prunier / Zahrat al-barquq (1973).
El Bassel, Khatib. Syrian filmmaker.
Born in 1962 in Holland of Syrian parents, he
studied filmmaking in Moscow, graduating
in 1987. He has written a novel, Dreams of the
Sacred Plant, and translated the autobiographies of Andrei Tarkowski and Ingmar Bergman. He has also made short films and television series. Feature film: The Last Message / Le
dernier message (2000, 115', 35mm).
El Chamaa, Sabine. Lebanese filmmaker. She
studied Communication Arts at Beirut University and film at the University of Southern
California. She has worked as a freelance editor in Europe and the United States since 1997.
Short fictional film: How Beautiful the Sea /
Quelle est belle la mer / Ma ahla al-bahr (2003,
10', 35mm). Contributed Black on White / Noir
sur blanc (3') to the collective project Videos
Under Siege (DIFF 2008, 39', video).
El Gemayel, Sabine. Lebanese filmmaker. After living in Iran and Lebanon as a
child, she moved to Canada in 1987 and studied at Concordia University in Montreal. After
graduating in 1993, she wrote and directed

three short 16mm films before moving to Los
Angeles the following year. She has edited a
number of feature films, including the Palestinian Hanna Eliass The Olive Harvest (2002).
Feature film: Niloofar (2008).
El Habre, Simon. Lebanese filmmaker.
Born in Beirut, he studied at the Fine Art
Academy in Beirut, graduating in 2001. He
has directed commercials and news reports
for channels including MBC, Al Arabiya, and
Al Jazeera and also worked as an editor on
short films. Feature-length documentary: The
One-Man Village / Le village dun seul homme
/ Samaan bildayaa (2008, 86', HDCAM).
El Haddad, Laila. Palestinian filmmaker.
Documentary: Tunnel Trade (with Saeed Taji
Farouky, 2007, 22').
El Horr, Dima. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
fictional film: The Street / La rue / al-Havi
(1997), Imm Ali Ready to Wear / Prt porter
Imm Ali (2003, 27', 35mm).
El Jeiroudi, Diana. Syrian filmmaker. Born in
1977 in Damascus, she studied English literature at the University of Damascus. She founded the only independent film production unit
in Syria, Proaction Films. Short films: The Pot
/ al-Qarura (2004, 20', video), Good Morning /
Sabah al-khayr (2004, 3', 16mm).
El Khoury, Nadyne. Lebanese filmmaker. She
studied filmmaking at IESAV in Beirut. Made
a first documentary in 1994, then the short fictional film Wash No. 10,452 / Lessive 10.452 /
Ghasil raqm 10452 (1995, 13', Beta).
El Khoury, Tania. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1976 in Beirut, she studied audio-visual media at IESAV and then worked as sound engineer and editor on several productions. One
short fictional film: Yasmina (1999, 8'), and a
documentary: Abdo (with Ajram Ajram, 2002,
25', Beta SP).
El Koury, Fouad. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in Paris of Lebanese parents, he studied civil
architecture in London and then turned to
photography. He has published a series of
books of his photographs: Beyrouth Centre Ville (1991), Palestine, lenvers du miroir
(1996), Liban provisoire (1998), Suite gyptienne (1996). Short films: Quiet Days in Palestine / Jours tranquilles en Palestine (1998, 13'),
Letters to Francine / Lettres Francine (2003,
documentary, 43', Beta SP).
El Omari, Majdi. Palestinian filmmaker. He
studied filmmaking at the Cairo Higher Institute of Cinema and at Concordia University in
Montreal. Resident in Canada, he has filmed
in Egypt, Tunisia, Canada and Palestine.
Short films: The Question of Assad / La question dAssad / Soal Assad (in Egypt, 1988, 15',
16mm), The Quiver of the Branch by the Wind
(in Egypt, 1989, 25', 35mm), The Evergreen
Oak (in Tunisia, 1993, 25', Beta SP), About the
Other / Au sujet de lautre / An al-akbar (in
Canada, 1996, 60', Beta SP), Traces in the Rock
of Elsewhere / Traces dans le rocher du lointain
/ Athar ala sakhra al-Aqsa (in Canada, 1998,
15', video), At the Window (Canada / Palestine,
2004, 30', Beta SP).
El Rahabani, Maounan. Lebanese filmmaker.
Documentary: The End of Summer / Fin de
lt (1981, 35mm).
El Sanjak, Ibrahim. Emirati filmmaker. He
Short film: Reoccurrence (2003, 4', DV Cam).
El Yasin, Jamal. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentaries: On the Borders of the Nation / Aux
frontires de la nation / Alla hudud al-watan
(1993), Announcement from the Mosques of Jerusalem / Bayan min maazin al-Quds (1993).
El Yasir, Nada. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Four Songs for Palestine /
Arbaaghani li Filastin (2001, 13', Beta SP).
Elias, Hanna. Palestinian filmmaker.
Born in 1957 in Jerusalem, he graduated from
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the UCLA film school in 1991. He made several documentaries, among them Departure /
Le dpart / Rahl (1986), The Roof / Le toit / alSaqf (1987), The Morning / Le matin / al-Subh
(1991), The Mountain / La montagne / al-Jabal
(1992, 34'), and Road Blocks / Barrages routiers
/ Hawajiz al-tariqat (2002, 30', Beta SP), as well
as a Palestinian television series for children.
He also worked on a United Nations program
on women in Palestine. Feature film: The Olive
Harvest / La cueillette des olives / Mawsim alzaytun (2002, 83', 35mm).
Elly, Carmen. Emirati filmmaker. Her sole
film, shot in the United States, is a short fictional film: A Guy Walks into a Bar (1997, 28',
16mm).
Eltaieb, Mina. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at the American University of Sharjah.
Short experimental films: Confiscated Footage
(with Reem Mohd, 2004, 10', Mini DV), Perverse, Almost Religious (2005, 4', DVD).
Erfan, Ahmed. Syrian filmmaker. Feature
film: The Passer-By / Le passant / Abir sabil
(1950, 90', 35mm).
Esber, Abeer. Syrian filmmaker. Short fictional film: Tek ... Tek (2006, 13').
Essa, Rima. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentary: Ashes (2001, 37'), Drying Up Palestine (with Peter Snowdon, 2007, 28').
Essam, Ahmad. Emirati filmmaker. Studied
film: Anti-Smoking (with Arwa Alsabahi,
2007, 1', DVD).
Faddoul, Merva. Jordanian filmmaker. Documentary: T for Middle Eastern (2006, 12').
Fahdah, Youssef. Syrian filmmaker. A pioneer of Syrian cinema, he made a number of
documentaries, including The Beginnings of
Cinema in Syria / Les dbuts du cinma en Syrie / Bidayat al-cinama fi Sourriya (1964, 25').
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He is in charge of the laboratories of the General Cinema Organisation.

Fahdel, Abbas. Iraqi filmmaker. Born in
Iraq, he moved to France to study at the age
of 18. He has worked as a journalist and critic. His first documentary deals with his own
return to Iraq after a number of years. Documentaries: Back to Babylon / Babylone (2002,
52', Beta SP), We, the Iraqis / Nous les Irakiens
(2004, 54', Beta SP). Feature film: Dawn of the
World / Laube du monde (2007, 97', 35mm).
Fahdi, Joseph. Lebanese filmmaker. He
shot both his feature films in a wide screen
format of his own devising: Libano Scope.
Feature films: For Whom the Sun Rises / Pour
qui se lve le soleil / Liman tachrok al-chams
(1958, 35mm), A Stranger in the House / Une
trangre la maison / Fil dar ghariba (1961,
35mm).
Faq, Tahya. Iraqi filmmaker. Feature film:
Warda (1956, 97', 35mm).
Faisal, Wafa. Emirati filmmaker. She studied
at Dubai Womens College. Short films: Adolescent Colors (with Maitha Ebrahim, Nada
Salem, Hana Abdullah Mohammed al-Mulla
al-Muhairi, Heba al-Dhanhani 2005, 28', DV
Cam), The Rock (2005, 40', DV Cam), Strong
and Weak (2006, 1', Mini DV).
Fakih, Nasser. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1970 in Beirut, he studied science and filmmaking at university in New York. He has
worked as a reporter for Future Television in
Beirut, for which he made the fictional short,
Luna Park (1995, 6', Beta SP), and a documentary, Superman (1995, 5', Beta SP).
Fanari, Mohamed Munir. Iraqi filmmaker. Born in 1949 in Syria, he studied filmmaking in Paris. He also worked for Iraqi
television, where he made A New Fascism /
Un nouveau fascisme / Fashiya jadida (1976).
Feature film: The Lover / Lamant / al-Ashiq
(1986).
Faour, Ahmed. Emirati filmmaker. Of Palestinian origin, he studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short films: You Cant Stop
Time (2003, 3', DV Cam), Diary from Ramallah (2004, 7', Mini DV), Respite of the Human
Mind (2004, 5', Mini DV).
Fars, Josef. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1977 in Lebanon, he settled with his family in
Sweden at the age of 10. At the age of 15, he began making amateur films and in 1998, at 21,
he began formal film training. Between 1995
and 2002 he made numerous fictional shorts,
including Madmen / Fous, The Thief / Le voleur, The Filmmakers / Les Cinastes, Come /
Viens. His first two features were well received
in Sweden. Feature films: Jalla! Jalla! (2000,
88', 35mm), The Cops / Les flics (2003), Zozo
(2005, 103', 35mm).
Farhat, Rana. Emirati filmmaker. Born and
raised in the UAE though of Lebanese origin, she studied at the American University of
Sharjah. Short fictional films: Reality vs. Reality (2004, 2', Mini DV), Got a Lighter? (2004,
7', Mini DV).
Farouky, Saeed Taji. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short documentary film: Tunnel Trade (with
Laila El Haddad, 2007, 22').
Fathallah, Dalia. Lebanese filmmaker.
Documentary: Chronicle of a Return to South
Lebanon / Chronique dun retour au Sud Liban
/ Mabrouk at tahrir (2002, 59', Beta SP). Feature film: Beirut between New York and Baghdad / Beyrouth entre New York et Bagdad
(2005) (documentary).
Fathallah, Zeina. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1967 in Beirut, she completed a masters degree in public health at the University of San
Jose in California and a doctorate in economics and the management of health systems at
the Universit de Paris I. In 2000 she took a
training course in directing organized by
the French Cultural Centre in Lebanon, and
became involved with the ecological movement, the Green Line, the subject of her first
documentary. Short fictional film: The Wedding Dress / La robe de marie / Fustan al-arus
(2000, 15', 16mm), documentary: On the Green
Line / Sur la ligne verte / Ala-l-khatt al-akdar
(2001).
Fawzi, Ali. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentary: Palestinian Youth / Shahiba min Filastin
(1979).
Fayad, Bassem. Lebanese filmmaker. Also
actor. Born in 1976 in Lebanon, he studied
at IESAV in Beirut and a made a number of
shorts there, including a fictional short, Soha
(1997, 15', video). Documentary: Beirut-Baghdad / Beyrouth-Bagdad (2003, 50', DV Cam).
Fikree, Badr. Emirati filmmaker. He studied
at Dubai Mens College and works for Dubai
Petroleum Company. Short documentary
film: Behind Closed Doors (2002, 6', Beta SP).
Fleifel, Mahdi. Palestinian filmmaker. Born
in 1979 in Dubai of Palestinian origins, he
moved in 1987 to Lebanon. He subsequently
studied film in Copenhagen and at the International Film School of Wales. He now lives
in Denmark. Four short fictional and experimental films during his studies: A Perfect Day
(1998, 10'), The Elevator (2001, 2'), It Is Me
(2002, 10'), and Life in the Bathroom (2002, 5').
Short films: Shadi in the Beautiful Well (2003,
11', Beta SP), Hamoudi and Emil (2004, 23',
16mm), Arafat and I (2008, 18').
Fouad, Ahmed.* Egyptian director of one
Syrian feature film: The World in the Year 2000
/ Le monde en lan 2000 (1972, 35mm).
Fouladkar, Assad. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in 1961 in Beirut, he studied drama in
Lebanon, and filmmaking at the University of
Boston,where he also worked for Arab-American Television. He teaches filmmaking at
the American University in Beirut and at the
University of Kaslik. He has made a number
of short films and documentaries, most notably the short fictional film Kyrie eleison (1988,
24', Beta SP). He has also made series for tele-
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vision: Ismail (1997) and Beautiful Madness
(2001). Feature film: When Maryam Spoke Out
/ Quand Maryam sest dvoile / Lamma hikyit
Maryam (2001, 98', 35mm).
Freij, Issa. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentary: Lost Freedom / al-Hurriyya al-daia
(2000), The Last Spring at Abu-Dis / Le dernier
printemps Abu-Dis (2005, 28', video).
Fuda, Aymn Ibrahim. Emirati filmmaker.
Short animated film: Tarik Ibn Ziad: The
Knight of El-Aldalus / Faris al-andalus: Tarik
Ibn Ziad (2006).
Garabdian, Gary. Lebanese filmmaker. He studied in the United States and worked
for Lebanese television. He was killed in 1969,
along with twenty others, in a fire during the
shooting of a nightclub scene in his fifth feature. Feature films: The Vigilant Eye / Lil vigilant / al-Ayn al-sahira (1963, 35mm), O Night
/ O nuit / Ya leil (1964), Garo / Garo (1965,
35mm), Abou Selim in Africa / Abou Slim en
Afrique / Abou Slim fi Afriquia (1965, 35mm),
We Are All Freedom Fighters / Nous sommes
tous des fdayins / Koullouna fidaiyyoun (1969,
35mm).
Garda, Daniel. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Tripoli, Quiet / Trablos al-hada
(with Rania Attieh, 2009, 15').
Gargash, Lamya Hussein. Emirati filmmaker. Born in 1982, she studied audio-visual
communication at the American University
of Sharjah. Short fictional film: Damp Soil
a.k.a. Wet Tiles / Sol mouill (2003, 8', Beta SP),
Woman at Seven (2005, 17', Mini DV)..
Gargash, Maha. Emirati filmmaker. Short
films comprise an animation: Great Civilisations (1992, 9', video), and documentaries:
Wilfred Thesiger (2000, 9', Beta SP), Echo of
Days: Traditional Dances and Chants in the
Emirates (2000, 30', Beta SP), Heart of the
Emirates Mountains (2000, 9', Beta SP).
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Gargour, Maryse. Palestinian filmmaker.

Born in Jaffa in Palestine, she studied at the
French Press Institute and worked as a journalist and producer at the office of RTF in Beirut. She also worked for UNESCO. Documentaries: A Palestinian Looks at Palestine / Une
Palestinienne face la Palestine (1988, 28', Beta
SP), My Jaffa / Jaffa la mienne (1998), Far from
Palestine / Loin de Palestine (1999), Blanches
Homeland / Le pays de Blanche / Watan Blansh
(2001, 28', Beta SP), The Land Speaks Arabic /
La terre parle arabe (2007, 61', video).
Gebran, Jean. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1971 in Beyrouth, he studied physical sciences
and sound. He worked within theatre and film
in sound and as assistant director. Short fictional film: Chabrouh (1994, 17mm, Beta).
Gedeon, Andr. Lebanese filmmaker.
Born in 1941 in Katuly in South Lebanon, he
followed his initial studies of law with a diploma in filmmaking from FAMU, the Prague
film school. He has also worked in the theatre,
in television and in journalism. He made several short films in Prague (19681972): A Dogs
Life / Vie de chien, Death and Company / Mort
et compagnie, Tenderness / Tendresse, The Old
Lady Enjoys Herself / La vieille dame samuse,
The Devil / Le diable / al-Shaytn. Feature
films: Lebanon, In Spite of Everything / Le
Liban, malgr tout / Loubnan roughma koula
chai (1982, 120'), Our Little Kings / Nos petits
rois / Mulkund al-sighar (1983).
Gergis, Youssuf. Iraqi filmmaker. Feature film: Abou Hella / Abu hila (with Mohamed Choukri Jamil, 1962).
Geries, Raneen. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentary: Womens Testimonies of the Nakba
(2006, 10').
Ghaibeh, Lina. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
animated film: Seven Days a Week / Sept jours
par semaine (1987, 3').
Ghalayini, Razan. Jordanian filmmaker.
Short fictional film: Noor (2008, 24').
Ghanayem, Samar. Emirati filmmaker. She

Short fictional film: I Went Crazy Once (2004,
2', Mini DV).
Ghandour, Amer. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1961 in Beirut, he studied at the cole Suprieure de Ralisation in Beirut. He later
worked as reporter for Lebanese and French
television. Documentary: Une femme (1987,
20', 16mm).
Ghanem, Eiman Ahmed. Emirati filmmaker.
She studied at the Abu Dhabi Womens College. Short film: A Point of No Return (with
Rana Mohamed al-Hammadi and Dana Ali
al-Hosani, 2003, 2', DV Cam).
Ghannam, Lubna. Emirati filmmaker. She
Short films: The Grinder (2007, 5', Mini DV),
Going Back (2007, 2', Mini DV), Squid Special
(2007, 3', Mini DV).
Ghayad, Georges. Lebanese filmmaker.
Worked initially in television. Feature films:
The Ghost from the Past / Le fantme du pass
/ Chabah almadi (1984, 35mm), The Session Is
Over / La sance est leve / Wa roufiat al-jalsa
(1986, 35mm).
Ghazi, Christian. Lebanese filmmaker.
Primarily a man of the theatre, he made one
documentary on Palestine, Why the Resistance? / Pourquoi la rsistance? / Limdha althawra (1970), and two features, the second a
Syrian co-production. Feature films: The Freedom Fighters / Les fedayins / al-Fidaiyyoun
(1967), A Hundred Faces for a Single Day /
Cent visages pour un seul jour / Miat wajh li
yom wahed (1972, 72').
Ghorayeb, Joseph. Lebanese filmmaker.
Feature film: The Judgement of Fate / Jugement
du destin / Hokm al-kadar (1959, 35mm).
Ghorayeb, Samer. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1979 in Lebanon of Lebanese-Italian par-
ents. Short film: The Little Black Book / Le petit
cahier noir (2008, 27', 35mm).
Ghorra, Nadine. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1972, she graduated from Fine Art Academy in Beirut (ALBA) in 1999. One documentary, Zahl, and a fictional short, The Siren / La
sirne / al-Huriya (1999, fiction, 18', Beta SP).
Ghosh, Lekha. Emirati filmmaker. Short documentary film: The Land of a Gazelle and Indian Bengali Expatriates (2007, 37', Mini DV).
Ghsein, Ahmad. Lebanese filmmaker. Contributed . . . False Connection (4') to the collective project Videos Under Siege (DIFF 2008,
39', video).
Gloor-Fadel, Samira. Lebanese filmmaker.
Born in 1956 in Beirut, she studied filmmaking at INSAS in Brussels and workled as a
journalist. She currently lives in Switzerland.
Her sole documentary is a conversation with
the German director Wim Wenders: Berlin
cinema (1997, 105', 35mm).
Gorani, Joude. Syrian filmmaker. Born in
1980 in Syria, she studied filmmaking at FEMIS in Paris, where she now lives. She worked
as cinematographer on several documentaries:
Nidal al-Dibss Black Stones, Camilla Magids
When I Evaporated and Diana Eljeroudis
Dols. Her graduation film is the documentary:
Before Vanishing / Avant de disparatre / Qabla
el-ikhtifa (2005, 18', video).
Habash, Ahmad. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short films: Moon Eclipse / Uful al-qamar
(2001, 50', DVD), Coming Back / Iyab (2003,
DVD), Animation Collection (20032004, set
of 15' animations), Fatenah (2009, 20'). Contributed Flee (3' 03") to the collective film
Summer 2006, Palestine (2006, 35', Beta SP).
Habash, Ismal. Palestinian filmmaker. He
worked as a cameraman in Ramallah. Short
films: Theres Still Kaek on the Sidewalk / Ma
zal kak alla al-rasif (2000, 27'), Apartment
(2001), Local / Mahalli (with Imad Ahmed and
85
Raed al-Helou, 2002, 53'), My Dream / Mon
rve / Amani (2002, 17'), Say Hi / Radfi alsalam (2003). Also contributed one episode to
in Palestine) / Une fois encore (cinq histoires sur
al-Yassir, Tawfik Abu Wael, Abdel Salam Shehada, Najwa Najjar, 2002, 57', Beta SP).
Habash, Lubna Jasim. Emirati filmmaker.
Short commercial: The Beginning (2002, 3',
Beta SP).
Habchi, Samir. Lebanese filmmaker.
Born in 1961 in Lebanon, he studied filmmaking at the Kiev Higher Film Institute, then at
VGIK in Moscow, where he made two short
films, Khayalat sahra and As sabi al-aarage. In
Lebanon he made two further short films, The
Obsession / Lobsession / Izaj (1988) and The
Scarecrows / Les pouvantails (1988, fiction,
25', 35mm), as well as television series and
documentaries. His documentary The Lady of
the Palace was produced by Misr International
Films, Cairo. Feature films: The Tornado / Le
tourbillon / al-Isar (1992, 90', 35mm), Meshwar (2001), The Lady of the Palace / Sayidat
el-kasr (2003, documentary, 58'), Beirut Open
City Beyrouth ville ouverte (2008, 90', 35mm).
Habib, Mazin. Omani filmmaker. He studied
computer science at the University of Arizona.
Also a short story writer. Short fictional film:
The Return (2006, 6', DV Cam).
Habis, Zinardi. Lebanese filmmaker. Feature films: A Woman with a Monster / Une
femme chez un monstre / Imraa fi bayt imlak
(1983, 35mm), At the Mercy of the Winds / Au
gr des vents / Fi mahab al-rih (1986, 35mm).
Habr, Mirella. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
film: Little Beirut (2005, 13', video).
Haddad, Fadi G. Jordanian filmmaker. Short
fictional films: Once upon a Piano (2008, 26'),
High Heels (2009, 20').
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Haddad, Maha. Lebanese filmmaker. She

studied audio-visual media at IESAV in Beirut and works as a teacher. Short films: TurieB
/ ThouryeB (Beirut / Beyrouth spelled backward) (1998, 12'), Im Well, What About You /
Je vais bien, et toi? (2002, 24', 16mm).
Haddad, Marwan. Syrian filmmaker. He
studied fimmaking in Germany and worked
at first as a print journalist and then in radio.
He is director general of the National Cinema
Organisation in Damascus. Short films and
documentaries (19691974): Building and Defence / Construction et dfense /Bin wa difa
(1969), In a Working Class District / Dans un
quartier polulaire / Fi hay shaabi (1972, 20'),
The Return / Le retour / al-Awda (1974, 7'), The
Dream / Le rve (1974), Damascus O Damascus / Damas Damas (1978, 10'), Youth / La
jeunesse / al-Shabiba (1975), Faces and Colours
/ Visages et couleurs / Wajh wa alwn (1978),
Tumour / Tumeur (1978). Feature films: The
Wrong Way / Direction oppose a.k.a. Sens interdit / al-Ittijh al-mukis (1975), Sweet Like
a Berry, My Love / Doux comme un baie, mon
amour a.k.a. Lamour framboise / Habibati ya
hab al-tout (1979, 97').
Haddad, Sahib. Iraqi filmmaker. Born in
1939, he studied fine arts and then filmmaking
in Hungary. Assistant to the great Egyptian
director Youssef Chahine on The Ring Seller/
Le vendeur de bagues / Biya el-khawstim (1965)
in Lebanon. He also worked on the Lebanese
Gary Garabedians We Are All Freedom Fighters (1969). On his return to Iraq he worked
as an editor and at the newsreel company.
Feature films: Another Day / Un autre jour /
Yawm akhar (1978, 35mm), Mutawa and Bahia / Mutawa et Bahia / Mutawa wa Bahia
(with Zuhair al-Dijaili, 1982, 35mm), Flat No.
13 / Limmeuble No. 13 / Imara rakm 13 (1986),
Borders in Flames / Frontires en flammes /
Hudud al-mulahihah (1986).
Haddad, Victor. Iraqi director. Documentaries: Medacity / Mendacit / Tassawwul (1969),
Games of Chess / Jeux dchecs / Lab chitranj
(1969), American Football / Footbal amricain

/ Kurat al-qadam al-Americia (1973).
Hadeed, Aida Butti. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied television and radio at the UAE University, graduating in 2001, and currently
works as director for Sharjah TV. Short documentary film: Mariam (2003, 17', Beta SP).
Hadjithomas, Joana. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in 1969 in Beirut, she has constantly worked in collaboration with Khalil
Joreige. Both studied literature and film. Living between Paris and Beirut, they both now
teach at IESAV in Beirut (scriptwriting and
the aesthetics of the image, respectively).
They have also made photographic and video
installations. Short documentary films: The
Agony of the Feet, 333 Sycamore (1994), Mistaken Identities / Fautes didentit (1996),
Khiam / Khiyam (2000, 52', video), Ashes /
Cendres / Ramad (2002, 26', 35mm), The Lost
Film / Le film perdu / al-Film al-mafqud (2003,
42', Beta SP). They contributed three collaboratively made videos, Airport 1 (40"), Starry
Night (45"), and Beirut Ground Zero (1'), to the
collective project Videos Under Siege (DIFF
2008, 39', video). Feature films: Around the
Pink House / Autour de la maison rose / al-Beit
al-zahr (1999, 90', 35mm), A Perfect Day / Un
jour parfait / Yawm akhar (2005, 88', 35mm),
I Want to See / Je veux voir (2007, 75', 35mm).
Hafez, Lara Osama. Emirati filmmaker. Of
Palestinian origin, she studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short fictional film:
Flesh and Dust (2004, 6', Mini DV).
Hafez, Mohamed. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short fictional film: Manic Monday (2007,
7', DVD).
Hafez, Nagdi.* Egyptian filmmaker who
made a number of Syrian feature films in
the mid-1970s: A Woman Alone / Une femme
seule (1971, 35mm), Bridge of the Wicked / Le
Pont des mchants (1971, 35mm), The Crisis of
the Young / La crise des jeunes (1972, 35mm),
Flat for Love / Appartement de lamour (1973,
35mm), The Prostitutes of the Al Aram Avenue
/ Les prostitues de lavenue Al Aram (1973,
35mm), The Five Master Singers / Les cinq matres chanteurs (1974, 35mm).
Hage, Merdad. Lebanese filmmaker. Resident
in Canada. Short documentary film: Meantime in Beirut / Entre-temps Beyrouth (2002,
29', Beta SP).
Hadar, Sara. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1980 in Beirut, she has lived in Tunisia,
Greece, Syria and Egypt. He studied cinema
at IESAV in Beirut. Two short films: fiction
Myell (2003)and documentaryTante Hala
(2004, 14', Beta SP).
Haji, Mohammed Abdul Rahim. Emirati
filmmaker. Born in 1980, he studied at the
Dubai Mens College. Short documentary
films: DMC Students from Hong Kong (2001,
8', Mini DV), Henna Designs (2001, 4', Beta
SP), World Folkdance: The Philippines (2002,
10', Beta SP).
Hajjaj, Nasri. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentary: Shadow of Absence / Lombre de
labsense / Dhil al-gheyab (2007, 84', DigiBeta).
Hajjar, Rafic. Lebanese filmmaker. He
lived for a while in Egypt. On his return, he
made a series of documentaries exploring the
situation in Palestine in the 1970s: The Path /
Le chemin / al-Tarq (1973), Guns United / Les
fusils unis / al-Bandiq al-mutahida (1973,
35mm), May and the Palestinians / Mai et les
palestiniens / Ayyar . . . al-filastiniyn (1974,
35mm), The Intidada / Lintifada / al-Intfada
(1975, 35mm), Born in Palestine / N en Palestine / Mawlud fi Filastin (1975), Born in Palestine / N en Palestine (1975, 35mm) News
from Tel al-Zatar / Khabar min Tel al-Zatar
(1976), The Game / Le jeu / al-Laeib (1978, 20').
Feature films: The Shelter / Labri / al-Malja
(1980, 35mm), The Explosion / Lexplosion / alInfijar (1982), Fragile Houses / Maisons fragiles
a.k.a. Maisons de papiers / Bouyout min warak
(1984, 35mm).
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Hakki, Haytham. Syrian filmmaker. He
studied filmmaking in Moscow and has directed both fictional and short documentary
films: Water and Fire / Leau et le feu (1974),
The Change / Le changement (1974), Special
Mission / Mission spciale (1974), The Barrier
/ Le barrage (1975), The Swing / La balanoire
(1979). The Game / Le jeu (1979). Since his feature film debut, he has since worked for Syrian
television and for some Gulf television stations, making a number of works which have
attracted national attention. He is the head of
production at Orbit Television. Feature film:
The Report / Le rapport (1979).
Hakki, Inas. Syrian filmmaker. Short film:
The Path (27').
Halabi, Moutia. Lebanese filmmaker. Studied
at IESAV in Beirut and worked as an assistant
in Lebanese television. Short fictional film: A
Cry / Un cri (1997, 18', video).
Haleed, Feruza. Emirati filmmaker. Studied
fictional film: Mother in Palestine (2004, 3',
Mini DV).
Halil, Mahmud. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentary: Tayseer / Tayseer (2001).
Hallak, Orwa. Emirati filmmaker. He studied
films: The Image (2001, 13', video), Under the
Stairs (2002, 25', Beta SP), Paradox (2003, 8',
Mini DV).
Hamad, Sarra. Emirati filmmaker. Born
in 1984 in Fujairah, UAE, she studied at the
American University of Sharjah. Short film: A
Cheesy Dream (2004, 4', Mini DV).
Hamadeh, Khaled. Syrian filmmaker.
Born in 1930 in Damascus, he had professional training in film. He founded the film
section of the School of Fine Art in Damascus and also headed the film section of Iraqi
television. He made one fictional shortLittle Suns / Les petits soleils (1969)and some
88
twenty documentary films, including The Big

Festival / Le grand festival (1966), A Green
Road to the Sea / Une route verte vers la mer
(1968), Petroleum in Syria / Le ptrole en Syrie (1969), Yes, We Are Arabs / Oui, nous sommes Arabes / Naam nahnu arab (1969, 10'),
Women in Syria / La femme en Syrie (1969),
Theatre in Syria / Le thtre en Syrie (1970),
Children and the Festival / Les enfants et la fte
(1971), The Ommayades Mosque / La mosque
des Ommayades (1971), Damascan Wedding /
Noce damascne (1971), Damascan Houses /
Maisons damascnes (1972, 10'), The Master
/ Le matre (1973). Feature films: The Knife /
Le couteau / al-Sikkin (1972, 90', 35mm), Forbidden Love / Lamour interdit a.k.a. Amour
dfendu (1977, 35mm).
Hamaideh, Yasmin. Emirati filmmaker. Born
in 1985 in Doha, she moved to the UAE at
the age of 5, and later studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short film: Chances
(2006, 8', Mini DV).
Hamarneh, Hussam. Jordanian filmmaker
and member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. He studied at the University of Jordan and works as a hardware store manager.
Short film: Heartache (with Mais Hamarneh,
2004).
Hamarneh, Mais. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. She studied at the University of Jordan.
Short film: Heartache (with Hussam Ham
arneh, 2004).
Hamdan, Dima. Jordanian filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Gaza-London / Gaza-Londres
(2009, 15').
Hammad, Aya Kassem. Emirati filmmaker. Of Palestinian origin, she studied at the
American University of Sharjeh. Short film:
The Remains of My Identity (2006, 10', Mini
DV), Have You Ever (2007, 11', Mini DV).
Hamza, Jaffar. Bahraini filmmaker. Short
film: Pen Martydom (2005, 13', Mini DV).
Hamzeh, Nadia. Syrian filmmaker. She studied drama in Damascus and in Paris, and has
worked as an actress in television and film.
Short films: Paloma (2005, 21', Mini DV),
Strong and Weak (2006, 1', Mini DV).
Hanoun, Khalil. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1969 in Beirut, he studied history at a Lebanese university and then drama the Fine Art
Academy in Beirut. He has worked in advertising and for the television channel Future
Television, and also published two books of
poetry in Beirut: A Lot of Desire (1995) and Remains (1997). Short films: Its Finished / Cest
fini (1995), Tomorrow Perhaps / Peut-tre demain (1995, fiction, 9', Beta SP), Utopia / Utopie (1996), Rains Song (1997), To Whom it May
Concern (1998, 6', DV Cam), Pringles (2000),
Identity (2004, 34', DV Cam).
Harb, Amal. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1967 in Beirut, she studied at the Fine Art
Academy in Beirut. Short films: The Time / Le
temps (1997, 3', video), The Wall /Le mur (1998,
12', video), The Other Self (1999, 17', Beta SP
silent).
Haroun, Michel. Lebanese pioneer filmmaker who died in 1979. He was a highly successful stage actor and director who made just
one film. Feature film: Red Flowers / Fleurs
rouges / Zouhour hamra (1957, 35mm).
Hartyon, Karlo. Iraqi filmmaker. Born
in 1933 into a family of Palestinian emigrants
in Argentina, he studied filmmaking in Budapest. He later settled in Iraq, where he made
two documentaries. Feature film: A Little
Strength / Un peu de force / Cha min al-quwwah (1988).
Hasen, Anwar. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Colours Under the Sun / Couleurs sous le soleil (1995, 18').
Hashim, Tariq. Iraqi filmmaker. Based in
Denmark. His first film is the story of his
own return to Iraq after 23 years of exile.
Short films: 16 Hours in Baghdad / 16 heures
Bagdad (2004, 58', DV CAM), WWW. Gilgamesh.21 (2007, 52', Beta SP).
Hassairi, Faycal BK. Palestinian filmmaker.
He worked a producer on Mohamed Bakris
Jenin, Jenin. Short documentary film: Tresspassers Will Be Severely Tortured (2003, 44',
DigiBeta).
Hassan, Ahmed Juma. Emirati filmmaker.
Born in 1988 in Dubai, he studied at the Dubai
Mens College. Short film: Brotherhood (with
Saif Ben Qumasha, 2007, 2', DV Cam).
Hassan, Amira Mohammad. Emirati filmmaker. Born in the UAE, of Palestinian origin, she studied at the American University of
Sharjah. Short films: I Am Palestinian (2004,
14', Mini DV), Multiple Masks (2004, 9', Mini
DV).
Hassan, Dawoud. Qatari filmmaker. Born in
Egypt, also a journalist. Short documentary
film: Souk Waqif (with Mohammed Alomary,
2007, 10', DV Cam).
Hassan, Nizar. Palestinian documentary filmmaker. Born in 1960 in the village
of Mashad in the Nazareth area, he began his
filmmaking career in the early 1990s, without formal training. His documentaries include: Hands of Tomorrow / Mains de demain
/ Sawaid al-ghad (1991), Women in a Mans
World / Les femmes dans le monde des hommes
/ al-Nisa fi alam al-rjal (1991), To His Mother
. . . Fun and Games / A sa mre . . . Jeux et
amusements / Ila ummhu ... Laab wa Laaab
(1991, 42'), Bethlehem / Bethlem / Bayt Laham
(1992), Independence / Indpendance / Istiqlal
(1994, 55', Beta SP), Words / Paroles (1995),
Challenge / Le dfi / Tahaddi (2001, 20', Beta
SP), Invasion / Envahissement / Ijtiyah (2003,
60', Beta SP), Abou Khahils Grove / Karem
Abou Khahil (2005). Feature-length documentaries: Jasmine / Yasmin (1996, 80', video),
Myth a.k.a. Ostura / Mythologies / Ustura
(1998, 90', Beta SP), Cut / Coupure (2000, 70').
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Hassan, Reem Ahmed. Emirati filmmaker.
Born in 1987 in Alexandria, Egypt, she studied at the American University of Sharjah.
Short fictional films: Captured (2007, 2', Mini
DV), Versus (2007, 4', Mini DV), Or? (2007, 2',
Mini DV).
Hassan, Samir. Jordanian filmmaker. Documentary: After the Defeat / Aprs la dfaite /
Baad al-naksa (1968, 40').
Hassani, Kameran. Iraqi filmmaker. He
studied in the United States and, on his return,
co-founded the company which produced his
three features. He abandoned filmmaking after the commercial failure of the final two of
the three films. Feature films: Sad Effendi /
Said Afandi (1957, 35mm), Wedding Proposal
/ Projet de mariage / Mashro zawadj (1962,
35mm), Room No. 7 / Chambre No. 7 / Gorfa
raqm sabaa (1964, 35mm).
Hatoum, Mona. Palestinian filmmaker. Born
in 1952 in Beirut, to Palestinian parents, she
has lived in London since 1975. She studied at
Beirut University and the Slade School of Art
in London (till 1981). A sculptor and installation artist, she has taught at various European
universities and travelled to Canada and the
United States. Short films: So Much I Want to
Say (1983, 5', video), Changing Parts (1984, 24',
video), Eyes Skinned / Les yeux voils (1988, 4',
video), Measures of Distance / Les mesures de
la distance (1988, 15', Beta SP), Foreign Body /
Corps tranger (1994, video Installation).
Hawal, Qassim. Iraqi filmmaker who directed one Syrian feature film: The Hand / La
main / al-Yad (1970). Born in 1940, he studied
at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad. He
worked in the theatre and as a journalist for
Iraqi television. He produced Khalil Chawqis
The Night Watchman / Le veilleur de nuit
(1968) and in 1970 joined the Palestinian resistance, whose cause he defended in several
films: Daily Life in the Nahr El Bared Camp
/ La vie quotidienne au camp Nahr el Bared
a.k.a. Le fleuve froid / al-Nahr al-brd (1971),
Ghassan Kanafani: The Word-Gun / Ghassan
90
Kanafani, le mot-fusil / Ghassan Kanafani alkalima boundouqiyaa (1973, 20', 16mm), The
Guns Will Not Remain Silent / Les fusils ne
resteront pas en silence / Ian taskut al-bandiq
(1973), Why We Scatter Roses ... Why We Carry Guns / Pourquoi nous parpillons des roses
... pourquoi nous portons des fusils / Limadha
nazrau al-ward ... limadha nahmilu al-silh
(1973, 25', 16 +35mm), Our Little Houses / Nos
petits maisons / Buyutuna al-saghra (1974),
The Marshes / Les marais / al-Ahwar (1976, 42',
Beta SP), Lebanon, Tal al-Zaatar / Le Liban,
Tal al-Zaater / Lubnn Tal al-Zaatar (1978),
New Life / Une nouvelle vie / Hayt jadida
(1978), The Massacre of Sabra and Shatila / Le
massacre de Sabra et Chatilla / Al-majzara,
Sabra wa Shatla (1984), The Palestinian Identity / Lidentit palestinienne / al-Hawiyya al
falastnya (1984). Feature films: The Hand /
La main / al-Yad (in Syria, 1970), The Houses in That Alley / Les maisons de cette ruelle
/ Bitut fi dhalika al-zuqaq (1977, 90', 35mm),
Return to Haifa / Le retour Haifa / Aid ila
Hayfa (1981), Looking for Princess Leila / la
recherche de la princesse Layla / al-Baath ...
an Layla al-amiriyyah (1992).
Hayat, Anwar Mohammad. Bahraini filmmaker. He worked as a cameraman. Short
film: Al-Fares (2006, 14', DV Cam), The Guide
(2007, 16', DVD).
Haydamous, Mounir. Lebanese filmmaker.
Short fictional film: Rain Maker / Le faiseur de
pluie (2002, 14', DV Cam).
Helal, Mohammed. Saudi filmmaker. Short
film: Mission in City Centre (2008, 56', HD).
HINDASH, FADI. Jordanian filmmaker. Feature-length documentary: Not Quite the Taliban / Pas encore le Taliban (2009, 70').
making documentaries for Lebanese television: The Third Age / Le troisime age, The
Theatre in Lebanon / Le thtre au Liban, History of Lebanese Independence / Histoire de
lindpendance libanaise. He has also worked
for French television: The Green Line / La ligne
verte and Beirut Paris Beirut / Beyrouth Paris
Beyrouth. Other documentaries: Twenty-four /
Vingt-quatre / Arbaa wa ichreeh (1971), Beirut:
The Dialogue of Ruins / Beyrouth, le dialogue
des ruines (1993, 52', 1993), Kidnapped (1999,
50', video). Feature film: Belt of Fire / Ceinture
de feu / Zinnar al-nar (2003, 95', 35mm).
Hojeij, Mahmoud. Lebanese filmmaker.
Born in 1975 in Lebanon, he studied art and
communication at the Lebanese American
University in Beirut, film at Sheffield Hallam
University and completed his Doctorate in
Switzerland. He now teaches at the American
Lebanese University. Documentaries: Wahdoun (1997), Spring (1998), Once / Il tait une
fois (1997, 11', video), Shameless Transmission
of Desired Transformation per Day (2000, 25',
video), We Will Win (2006), Memories of Ras
Beirut: Wish You Were Here (2006, 51'), Ladies,
Women, Citizens / Anisat, nisaa, mouwatinat
(2007, 55', HDCam).
Homsy, Georges. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
film: Miracle (2004, 25', 35mm).
Hosa, Mohamed Khalil. Emirati filmmaker.
Studied media at Sharjah University. Short
films: The Treasure (2005, 5', Mini DV), The
Sixth Finger (2006, 2', Mini DV), Derani Cola
(2006, 1', Mini DV), Blood Spot (2006, 14',
Mini DV).
Hlailaat, Khaled. Jordanian filmmaker. Short

fictional film: Justice of Vengeance (2007, 45').
Hosni, Rami. Emirati filmmaker. Of Syrian background and resident in Saudi Arabia.
Short fictional films: Execution or Jail (2006,
12', Mini DV), Yalla Tourist Taxi (2007, 1',
Mini DV), Twisted Roles (2007, 2', Mini DV), A
Word to Regret (2007, 7', Mini DV).
Hojej, Bahij. Lebanese filmmaker. Born

in 1948 in Zahle, he studied philosophy, drama and filmmaking. He has worked largely
Hotait, Laila. Lebanese filmmaker. Her first

documentary, made with her sister Nadia,
explores postwar Lebanese cinema as an emi-
91
grants cinema: Beirut ... Coming Back to You

Is Not Painful (with Nadia Hotait, 2005, 12').
cur de lhistoire (1991, 45'), The Silk Route /

La route de la soie (1992, 47').
Hotait, Nadia. Lebanese filmmaker. Her first

documentary, made with her sister Laila, explores postwar Lebanese cinema as an emigrants cinema: Beirut ... Coming Back to You
Is Not Painful (with Laila Hotait, 2005, 12').
Ibrahim, Hussain. Emirati filmmaker. Born

in 1959, he has worked for Sharjah Radio and
Abu Dhabi TV. Short films: Emirates Dream:
A Vision of Eternity (2002, 18', Beta SP), 01'03
(with eleven other directors, 2004, 12' Mini
DV).
Hreib, Walid. Syrian filmmaker. He studied

editing in Germany and edited more than
forty short films and features. Short films: One
Day at the Farm / Un jour la ferme, Nostalgia
/ La nostagie, The Call / Lappel, al-Ajjaj, The
Mahabba Festival / Le festival de Mahabba, A
Brief Moment of Happiness / Un bref moment
de bonheur (2001, 7', 35mm), One Square Metre / Un mtre carr (2003, 10', 35mm).
Huda, Mohamed Abul. Emirati filmmaker.
He was born in Jordan but raised in Sharjah,
where he attended the American University.
Short film: Regret (2005, 6', Mini DV).
Humaid, Ahmed Juma Bu. Emirati filmmaker. Short films: (2) Suicide (2007, 1', Mini DV),
Devils Walk (2007, 3', Mini DV).
Humeid, Ahmad. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. He studied at the University of Jordan. Short films: MetroPulse: A City in Motion
(1997), Aqaba Now (2003), Books (2003).
Hussein, Bassam. Syrian filmmaker. Short
film: al-Qinaa (2004, 20', 35mm).
Hussein, Cherif Abdel. Iraqi filmmaker. Documentary: The Path of Victory / Le chemin de
la victoire / Tarik al-nar (1969, 8').
Hussein, Sherine Hesham. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at the American University of
Sharjah. Short fictional film: Illusion (2004, 5',
Mini DV).
Husseini, Oussama. Syrian filmmaker. He
studied filmmaking in Paris. Documentaries:
Voyage to the Heart of History / Voyage au
Ibrahim, Lamya. Emirati filmmaker. She

Short fictional film: Surreal Solitude (2004, 10',
Mini DV).
Ibrahim, Mohamed. Emirati filmmaker.
Studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short film: Stallion Tea (2007, 1', Mini
DV).
Ibrahim, Muneer M. Emirati filmmaker.
Short film: Inequity (2006).
Ibrahim, Omar. Emirati filmmaker. Born in
1980, he is both actor and sound engineer.
After working as assistant on several films, he
made his own first short in 2005 and has contined working in various technical roles. Short
films: An Ordinary Day / Un jour ordinaire /
Youm aadi (2005, 10', video), Small Sky / Petit
ciel / Sama sagheera (with Abdullah Hassan
Ahmed, 2006, 14', Mini DV), Winter / Shetaa
(2006, 22', Mini DV), Supplication (2008, 10',
35mm).
Ibrahim, Reham. Emirati filmmaker. Born in
1983, she studied at the American University
of Sharjah. Short film: Them (2003, 12', DV
Cam).
Ibrahim, Sultan Abdulsalam. Emirati filmmaker. Short documentary film: RAD.10
(2007, 17', Mini DV).
Ibrahim, Vivian Mamdouh. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short film: Workers at Nine Ball
Caf (with Alya Mohamed Ali al-Mulla, 2003,
15', DV Cam).
92
Ibrahim, Yousef. Emirati filmmaker. Worked

as scriptwriter on a number of short films
from 2001 onward. Short fictional films: The
Last Bird (1994, 24', video), The Shadow (1999,
10', video).
Ideis, Riyad. Palestinian filmmaker. Short fictional film: Easy Easy (2008, 22', video).
Irshaid, Nabila. Palestinian filmmaker. She
was born in Osnabrck, Germany, and studied in Hamburg. Video art and installations.
Short film: Travel Agency / Agence de voyage /
Wakalat safar (2001, 14', Beta SP).
Ismael, Suheir. Palestinian filmmaker.
Worked as cinematographer. Documentaries: Palestinian Diaries (with Abdel Salam
Shehada and Nazih Darwaza, 1992, 52', Beta
SP), Peace Chronicles: On the Edge of Peace
(1994, 105', video), Administrative Detention
/ al-Eeteqal al-edari (1998 26'), Arab Diary /
Yaomiyyat arabiyya (2000).
Ismail, Azz al-Din. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short films: The Dream / Le rve / al-Hilm
(1994), Gaza 2006 (1996), Another World / Un
autre monde / al-Alam al-Akhar (1999).
Ismail, Hassan Ibrahim Hassan. Emirati
filmmaker. He studied at Dubai Mens College. Short films: Mental Illness (2007, 2', Mini
DV), Ashes to Ashes (with Ahmed al-Mazrooie, 2007, 4', Mini DV).
Issa, Youssef.* Egyptian director of a
Lebanese-Syrian co-production: The Likeable
Thief / Le voleur sympathique / al-Loss al-zarif
(1968, 35mm).
Jabbar, Ahmed. Iraqi filmmaker. He studied
at the Independent Film and Television Academy in Baghdad. Short film: Doctor Nabil
(2007, 15').
Jaber, Hiba Abdel. Emirati filmmaker. Born
in Dubai, she studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short fictional film: A Friend
Indeed (2004, 4', Mini DV).
Jaber, Jasim. Emirati filmmaker. Born in

Bahrain in 1958, he studied at the Television
and Film Academy in Cairo. After a first short
film, he has worked in television: Bahrain
TV (197787), Sharjah TV (198795), Dubai
TV (from 1997). Fictional film: The Last Mud
(1990, 60', Beta SP).
Jacir, Annemarie. Palestinian filmmaker. Born in 1974 in Saudi Arabia, which
she left at the age of 16 to study filmmaking at
Columbia University in New York. She lived
for a while between New York and Ramallah,
but now, banned from Palestine, she is based
in Amman. She has worked as an editor and
taught film at the Universities of Columbia,
Bethlehem, and Birzeit. Short films: Interview
(1994, 4'), Scratch (1996, 5'), A Post-Oslo History (1998, 8', video), Two Hundred Years of
American Ideology (2000), The Satellite Shooters / Les chasseurs de paraboles / Sayyad alsatilayt (2001, 16', 16mm blown up to 35mm),
Palestine Is Waiting / La Palestine attend /
Filastin tantazir (with Dahna Aburahme and
Suzy Salmy, 2003, 9', Beta SP), Like Twenty Impossibles / Comme vingt impossibles / Kanhun
ashrun mustahil (2003, 17', 35mm), A Few
Crumbs for the Birds / Quelques miettes pour
les oiseaux (with Nassim Amaouche, 2005, 29',
35mm), An Explanation (and Then Burn the
Ashes) (2005, 6', 16mm). Contributed Sound of
the Street (3' 06") to the collective film Summer
2006, Palestine (2006, 35', Beta SP). Her first
feature was shown at the Cannes film festival.
Feature film: Salt of This Sea / Le sel de la mer /
Milh hadha al-bahr (2008, 109', 35mm).
Jadallah, Ahmad. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied at the American University in Dubai.
Short films: Mission Impossible (2005, 10',
DVD), AUD 101 (2006, 11', DVD).
Jadallah, Hadi. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Hijara (2006, 18').
Jadallah, Ihab. Palestinian filmmaker. Fictional shorts: The Shooter (2007, 8'), Hijara
(2007, 19').
Jadallah, Sulafa. Pioneer Palestinian filmmaker. She participated actvely in the shooting and directing of many of Mustafa Abu
Alis collectively made documentaries of the
early 1970s.
Jafarawi, Hussein. Jordanian filmmaker.
Short fictional film: They Say There Is No Work
(2008, 10').
Jahami, Mouneir. Syrian filmmaker. Documentary: Octobers Harvest / La moisson
doctobre / Had uktubar (1974).
Jahry, Karsan. Syrian filmmaker. One documentary on Palestine for Syrian television.
Documentary: The Foreigners Dont Drink
Coffee / Les trangers ne boivent pas de caf /
al-Ghurab la lachruhu na-l-qahwa (1972,
46').
Jajeh, Jennifer. Palestinian filmmaker. She
studied at UCLA and the Lee Strasberg Studio
in New York, and is based in San Francisco.
She works as an actress and arts administrator. Short films: In My Own Skin (co-dir., 2001,
16'), Fruition (2003).
Jalal, Ibrahim. Iraqi filmmaker. Worked
in television. Feature film: Hamad and Hammud / Hamad et Hammud / Hamad wa Hammud (1980).
Jamal, Ali. Emirati filmmaker. He is also
an author, actor, and stage director who has
worked in television and radio. Short films:
The Lot of Shammah / Nasseb Shamma (2005,
18', HDV), The Birthday Gift / Hadiyat eid almilad (2007, 40', Mini DV), Brother / Akhoui
(2008, 16', HDV), Crossing (2009, 4', HD Cam).
Jamil, Mohamed Choukri. Iraqi filmmaker. Born in 1936 in Baghdad, he trained as
a documentary filmmaker with the oil companies, especially the Iraq Petroleum Company.
Subsequently he studied filmmaking both
in Cairo and at the National Film School in
Beaconsfield, England. On his return to Iraq
he worked as editor on Kamel al-Azzawis disastrous superproduction Nebuchadnezzar /
93
Nabuchodonsor / Naboched Nosser (1962) and
appeared as an actor in a comedy, Abou Hella
/ Abu hila (1962), for which some sources also
name him as co-director. He also made a short
fictional film: He Who Hopes for Prosperity /
Celui qui espre la prosprit (1967, 35mm),
and a number of documentaries: Nostalgia
for the Soil / Nostalgie de la terre / Hann alard (1971, 30', 35mm), Those who Excavate the
Land / Ceux qui fouillent la terre / Rijlun yarfuru amkin fi al-ard (1971, 19'), Baghdad in
a Mirror / Bagdad dans un miroir / Bagdad fil
mirat (1972, 30', 35mm), Man and Machine /
Lhomme et machine / Al-insan wal ala (1972,
52', 35mm), Problem / Problme / Warta (1972,
35', 35mm), Harsh Winter / Le rude hiver /
ach-Chiaec-Cab (1974, 15'). Feature films:
The Good Omen / Le bon augure / Chaif Khir
(1969, 35mm), The Thirsty Ones / Les assoiffs
/ al-Damiun (1972, 35mm), The Walls / Les
murs a.k.a. Les remparts / al-Aswar (1979, 94',
35mm), Clash of Loyalties a.k.a. The Big Question / La grande question / al-Massala al-korba
(1983, 170', 35mm), Mountain Knight / Le chevalier de la montagne / Faris al-jahal (1987,
35mm), King Ghazi / Le roi Ghazi / al-Malik
Ghazi (1990, 120', 35mm).
Janabi, Khaled Yousif. Bahraini filmmaker.
Born in 1963 in Bahrain, he studied fine art at
the University of Cairo. He worked as assistant
director on Bassam al-Thawanis feature film,
Visitor (2003). Short experimental film: Poet
(2003, 6', Mini DV).
Janahi, Mohammed Yousif. Bahraini filmmaker. Works for Bahraini Television. Short
films: Roosters Blood (1993), Time Game
(1995), The Paper (1999), Camera (2001, 30',
Beta SP), 01'03 (collective film made in UAE
12 directors, 2004, 13', Mini DV), A Message
(2006, 12', HDV).
Jankot, Mutaz. Jordanian filmmaker. Born in
1978 in Amman, he began making amateur
films. He later studied at the New York Film
Academy and the Intermediate University
College in Amman. He made over eleven documentaries before 2002. Short documentary
film: A Letter from Sarah (2002, 11', Beta SO).
94
Jarjoura, Katia. Lebanese filmmaker.

Documentries: Caught in Between / Entre
deux fronts (2001, 53', Beta SP), Princes of War,
Lords of Peace / Princes de la guerre, seigneurs
de la paix (2002), The Call of Karbala / Lappel
de Kerbala (2004, 75', Beta), Beirut ma Betmout (2006, 7', Mini DV). Fictional feature: Terminator (2006, 75', Min DV).
Jaroon, Taj Elsir Idris. Emirati filmmaker.
Short film: Successes of Abdulrahman Madani
(2002, 17', Beta SP).
Jassim, Mohammed Ahmed Ali. Emirati
filmmaker. He studied at Dubai Mens College. Short film: Water Equals Life (2006, 1',
DV Cam).
Jawad, Nizar. Bahraini filmmaker. Born in
1979, he studied media at the University of
Bahrain. Short films: Confessions (2005, 5',
Mini DV), The Flag (2005, 7', DVD).
Jbawi, Mounir. Syrian filmmaker. Short animated film: Digital (2002, 6', 35mm).
Ji, Ghazi Buqjah. Emirati filmmaker. He
worked with Syrian TV from 1982 and subsequently with Sharjah TV. Short films: The Image (2001, 11', Beta SP), The Fort Talks (2002,
10', Beta SP), The Silence (2003, 12', Beta SP).
Jingan, Abdullah. Emirati filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Al-Kyram (2000, 16', video).
Johariya, Hani. Pioneer Palestinian filmmaker. Born in Jerusalem in 1939, he studied filmmaking in Cairo and London. He joined the
Palestinian resistance in 1967, shot newsreel
material and served as cameraman, assistant,
or co-director on a number of the early 1970s
films of Mustafa Abu Ali, Qays al-Zubaydi
and Ghalib Shaath. He was killed in action in
Lebanon in 1976
Joreige, Khalil. Lebanese filmmaker.
All his work has been made in collaboration
with fellow Lebanese Joana Hadjithomas.
Both studied literature and film. They have
since worked together consistently and both

now teach at IESAV in Beirut (scripwriting
and the aesthetics of the image, respectively).
Working between Paris and Beirut, they have
also made photographic and video installations. Short documentary films: The Agony of
the Feet, 333 Sycamore (1994), Mistaken Identities / Fautes didentit (1996), Khiam / Khiyam
(2000, 52', Beta SP), Ashes / Cendres / Ramad
(2002, 26', 35mm), The Lost Film / Le film perdu / al-Film al-mafqud (2003). They contributed three collaboratively made videos, Airport
1 (40"), Starry Night (45"), and Beirut Ground
Zero (1'), to the collective project Videos Under Siege (DIFF 2008, 39', video). Feature films:
Around the Pink House / Autour de la maison
rose / al-Beit al-zahr (1999, 92', 35mm), A Perfect Day / Un jour parfait / Yawm akhar (2005,
88', 35mm), I Want to See / Je veux voir (2007,
75').
Jorgeige, Lamia. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
documentary film: Nights and Days (2007, 17').
Joujou, Fouad. Lebanese filmmaker.
Worked in advertising. Feature films: Kidnapped / Le kidnapp / al-Makhtouf (1983,
35mm), Karim Abou Chacra Does His Military
Service / Karim Abou Chacra fait son service
militaire / Karim Abdou Chacra fi khidmat alalam (1994, 35mm).
Kaadan, Soudade. Syrian filmmaker. Born in
France in 1979, she has lived and studied in
Syrian and Lebanon. She works in the audiovisual department of the Damascus Opera
House and has made documentaries for television. Short documentary film: Two Cities
and a Prison / Madeedatain wa sijn (2008, 39',
DigiBeta).
Kaado, Sayed. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1974, he studied sociology in Beirut and then
filmmaking at the Academy of Fine Arts. He
has made a few fictional shorts: Chance Visitors / Visiteurs par hasard (1977), Beirut /
Beyrouth (1978); and a dozen documentaries:
Night of Celebration / Nuit de fte (1972), A
Madmans Dream / Le songe dun fou (1973),
Letter of Independence / Lettre dindpendance
(1990), The Way of Return / La voie du retour
(1995), Cana (1997, 24', video), Ta-Ka-Sim
from Baghdad / Ta-Ka-Sim de Bagdad (1999,
52', video), Lift Up Your Head, Brother / Relve
la tte mon frre (2002, 48', Beta SP).
Kabeel, Mohammed. Emirati filmmaker.
Short fictional film: The Possessed (2007, 9',
Mini DV).
Kaddo, Maher. Syrian filmmaker. Born
in 1949 at Deir-Ezzar. He studied film directing. Feature film: Noises from All Sides / Le hnissement des directions a.k.a. Le priple / Sahil
al-jibat (1993, 97', 35mm), Gate of Heaven / La
porte au ciel / Bawabet al-janna (2009).
Kadhmi, Majeed. Bahraini filmmaker. Short
film: The Unknown (2008, 8', video).
Kadi, Sam. Syrian filmmaker, Short fictional
film: Schizophrenian (2008, 27', video).
Kahi, Georges. Lebanese pioneer filmmaker. He came from the theatre and his debut feature was based on a play he had produced successfully in Beirut. He claimed it
was the first film to be entirely Lebanese in all
its elements, both technical and artistic, but
its release was marred by disputes among the
twenty-two person theatrical collective that
had produced it, and Kahi did not make another film for 5 years. Feature films: Remorse /
Remords / Azab al-damir (1953, 35mm), Memories / Souvenirs / Zikrayat (1958, 35mm), Days
of My Life / Jours de ma vie / Ayyam min omri
(1959, 35mm), Two Hearts, One Body / Deux
curs, un corps (1959, 35mm), The White Poison / Le poison blanc / al-Sam al-abiad (1961,
35mm), The Devils Cart / La charrette du diable / Arabat al-chaitane (1962, 35mm), Years /
Des annes / Sinine (1962, 35mm), You Are My
Life / Toi, ma vie / Anta omri (1964, 35mm).
Kaidy, Fadhil Abbas Mohammad. Emirati
filmmaker. He studied at Dubai Mens College. Short film: Hope (2004, 2', Mini DV).
95
Kamal, Ahmed. Iraqi filmmaker. He studied
at the Independent Film and Television Academy in Baghdad. Short documentary film:
Documentary Course March 2006 (2007, 15').
Kammoun, Michel. Lebanese filmmaker.
Born in Sierra Leone in 1969, he studied mathematics in Beirut, followed by filmmaking at
ESEC in Paris. Short fictional films: Cathodic
/ Cathodique (1994, 7', 35mm), Shadows / Ombres (1995, 6', 16mm blown up to 35mm), The
Shower / La douche (1999, 10', 35mm), Clowning Around: The Vanishing Rabbits (2003).
Contributed A Minute of Silence for Lebanon
(1') to the collective project Videos Under Siege
(DIFF 2008, 39', video). Feature film: Falafel
(2006, 83', 35mm).
Kanaan, Leila. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1981 in Sada, she studied economics in
France, philosophy in Lebanon and then filmmaking at IESAV in Beirut. Short fictional
film: My Fathers House / La maison de mon
pre / Beit bayyi (2003, 21', Beta SP).
Kanaan, Souheil. Syrian filmmaker.
Feature film: The Horsemen of Liberation / Les
cavaliers de la libration (1974, 35mm).
Kanam, Kanam. Syrian filmmaker. Feature film: The Crossing / La traverse / alEkhtiraq (1974, 90', 35mm).
Kandil, Tarek. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
animated film: Superhajja (2006, 2').
Kansoul, Hala Abu. Emirati filmmaker. Born
in 1985 in Dubai, she studied at the American
University of Sharjah. Short films The Message
(2007, 5', Mini DV), Workaholic (2007, 2', Mini
DV), Going Somewhere (2007, 3', Mini DV).
Kaouach, Mohamed. Jordanian filmmaker. Feature film (on the struggle in Palestine): My Beloved Homeland / Ma patrie bien
aime / Watani habibi (1964).
96
Karam, Raf. Lebanese filmmaker. Short animated films: OK (1993, 3.5', Beta SP), Blackout
(1993, 3', Beta SP).
images (1995, animation, 4', 35mm), Memoirs

of a Primitive Man / Mmoires dun homme
primitif (1997, 19', 35mm).
Karama al-Amri, Saleh. Emirati filmmaker. He studied media at the Emirates University and cinema at the New York Academy
and worked as a journalist. One of the founders of the Abu Dhabi Theatre, for which he
wrote and directed plays. He has also published a collection of short stories, Sleepless
Nights, and scripted the film Carriage of the
Soul, directed by the British director Conrad
Clark. Short fictional and experimental films:
Al-Della: The Coffee Pot (2002, 4', DV Cam),
Turnstile (2003, 2', video), The Heavy Snowball (2003, 10', DV Cam), Valentine (2003, 4',
16mm), Sticky Doll (2003, 1', 16mm), Count
Bubble (2003, 4', DV Cam), Breathing Light
(2003, 17', DV Cam), Where Is My Shirt? (2003,
4', 16mm), Mirror (2003, 3', 16mm), Time Left
(2004, 28',16mm). Feature film: Henna (2008,
75', HD).
Katbi, Dima Arabi. Emirati filmmaker. Born

in Syria and growing up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, she studied at the American University
of Sharjah. Short fictional films: The Pathway
(2007, 4', Mini DV), The Proposal (2007, 4',
Mini DV), Over Excited (2007, 2', Mini DV).
Karim, Najm Abdel. Kuwaiti filmmaker. Directed a documentary on Palestine for Kuwaiti
television: Yes, No / Oui, non / Naam, l (1972,
25').
Kasem, Saleh. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. Born in France of Syrian descent, he
studied at the Arab Academy for Financial
Sciences, Jordan, and now lives between Aleppo in Syria and Amman in Jordan, where he
studied information science, before turning to
video. Short film: Sharar (with Ammar Quttaineh and Hazim Bitar, 2006, 15', Beta SP).
Kassem, Fadi. Lebanese filmmaker. Short fictional film: All for the Homeland / Tous pour la
patrie / Koullouna lil watan (2002, 29').
Kassem, Farah. Emirati filmmaker. Short
film: Child Labor (with Areej al-Hassan, 2007,
1', Mini DV).
Kat, Mouaffaq. Syrian filmmaker. Short films:
A Thousand and One Images / Les mille et une
Kawaan, Sokheie. Syrian filmmaker.

Feature film: Conqueror of Space / Conqurant
de lespace (1975, 35mm).
Kawadri, Tahsine. Lebanese filmmaker.
Feature film: Love in Istanbul / Lamour Istamboul / Gharam fi Istambul (1966).
Kawan, Omar. Emirati filmmaker. He studied civil engineering at Baghdad University
and has subsequently worked in the fields of
graphics and animation. He scripted six short
films for other directors before turning to direction. Short film: My Rights (with Mahmoud
Yousouf al-Mashni, 2003, 4', DV Cam).
Kayali, Mohamed Salah. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentary: Three Operations in
Palestine / Trois oprations en Palestine (1969).
Kayed, Hichem. Palestinian filmmaker. Born
in Lebanon, where he now lives and works.
Short films: Our Dreams ... When? / A quand
nos rves? / Ahlamna ... Emta? (2001, 16', video), God Forbid! (2001, 26', DV), The Sugar of
Yafa / Le sucre de Yafa / Sukkar Yafa (2002, 32',
DVD), Childhood in the Midst of Mines / Tufula bayn al-algham (2003, 18', DVD), Lemonade
(2005, 12'), Neither Here, Nor There (2006, 45').
Kermani, Naser. Kuwaiti filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Clowns (2003, 40', Beta SP).
Khadr, Dimitri. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1967, he studied film at Duncan of Jordaston
College of Art, University of Dundee. Short
documentaries: Living Icons / Icnes vivantes
(1998, 51', video), Travel / Safar (with Cynthia
Choucair, 2003, 28', DV Cam), Children of the
Cedars / Les enfants du cdre (2004, 58', video).
Khalaile, Jamal. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Escape / Evasion (2008, 17').
Khaled, Shadh. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at Dubai Womens College. Short documentary film: What Makes a Successful Song?
(2006, 12' DV Cam).
Khalif, lie. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1964 in Beirut, he studied at the cole Suprieure dArt Visuel in Geneva. Short films: May
Day (1988), Thank You Natex / Merci Natex
(1998, 13', 35mm), Beirut-Geneva / BeyrouthGenve (1989), Nine Times St Anthony / Neuf
fois Saint-Antoine (co-dir., 1990), Echoes /
chos (1991), Loves Messenger / Le messager
de lamour a.k.a. Le messager du vent / Mersal
el hawa (1993, 20', 16mm), Taxi service (with
Alexandre Monnier, 1996, 12', 35mm), Van
Express (2004, 21', 35mm).
Khalil, Fares. Lebanese filmmaker. Feature film: Childish Love / Amour denfants
(2008, 107').
Khalil, Mahmoud. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short film: Facilitation / Taysir (1984).
Khalil, Mano. Syrian filmmaker. Documentary: The Place Where God Sleeps / Lendroit o
Dieu dort / Tam kde boh spi (1995, 26', 16mm).
Khan, Jonathan Ali. Emirati filmmaker. Documentary: Under a Desert Sun (2005, 60', Beta
SP).
Khanamirian, Elda. Lebanese filmmaker.
Born in 1964 in Beirut, she studied filmmaking in the University of Boston and worked
as a reporter in Lebanon and England. Short
fictional film: Reflections in Time / Rflexions
dans le temps (1989, 8', 16mm).
Khatib, Razan. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. Born in 1974 in Amman, he studied at
the Arab Institute for Banking and Financial
97
Studies, Jordan, and works as an IT manager.
Short films: Nightmares of Reality (with Aseel
Mansour, 2003, 5', DV Cam), Small Victories
(2004, 13', DV).
Khatib, Suhad. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. She studied at the Applied Science
University, Jordan, and works as a graphic designer. Short films: Suwar (2003), Three Ghettos One Land (2004).
Khill, Ibrahim. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentaries: My City Nazareth / Ma ville Nazareth / Madinati al-Nassiriya (1978), Palestinians and Peace? / Les Palestiniens et la paix? /
al-Filastiniyyun wa al-salam? (1990), Budding
to Eternity / Bourgeonnement lternit /
Buram ila ahab (1993), Paul the Carpenter /
Paul le charpentier / Bulus al-najjar (1999, 52',
16mm).
Khlat, Yasmine. Lebanese filmmaker, actress,
and novelist. Born in 1959 in Ismala (Egypt),
she was raised in Lebanon, her parents native
country. She studied film at the Universit de
Censier in Paris. As an actress, she played the
leading roles in a number of major Arab films:
the Algerian Farouk Belloufas Nahla, the Tunisian Abdellatif Ben Ammars Aziza and the
Syrian Mohamed Malass City Dreams among
them. Resident in Paris since the early 1990s,
she published her first novel, Le dsespoir est
son pch in 2001. Documentary: Our Night /
Notre nuit / Leylouna (1987, 52', video).
Khleifi, George. Palestinan filmmaker. Short
films and documentaries: The Hermit / al-Nasik (1978), Lands of Sea and Sand / Bilad albahr wa al-raml (1982), The Palestinian Evacuation from Beirut / Khuruj al-filastiniyyeen
min Bayrut (1982), Children of Stones / Les
enfants des pierres / Atfal al-hajjara (with Ziad
Fahoum, 1988, 28'), Heart to Heart / Cur
cur / Min qalb ila qalb (1990), Jerusalem Under Seige / al-Quds that al-hisar (1990, 15'), The
Source of a Precocious Childhood / Masadir
al-tufula al-Mubakira (1991), Sunrise / Laube
/ Shuruq (1991), The Player of the Small Flute
/ Azef al-nay al-saghir (1995), You, I and Je-
98
rusalem / Anta, ana al-Quds (1997), Mariams

Dog / Kalb Maryam (with Tayseer Mashareqa,
2004). He is co-author, with Nurith Gertz, of
Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and
Memory.
Khleifi, Michel. Palestinian filmmaker.
Born in 1950 in Nazareth, he left Palestine in
1970 and later studied at INSAS in Belgium,
graduating in 1977. He worked in Belgian television (RTBF), making several reports and
documentaries, including The West Bank:
The Palestinians Hope? / Cisjordanie, espoir
palestinien? / al-Diffa al-qarbiyya ... al-Amal
al-filastiniyyah (1978, 58'), Israeli Settlements in the Sinai / Les colonies israliennes
dans le Sina / al-Mustawtinat al-Isailiyya fi
Sina (1978, 50'), Ashrafiyya / Achrafieh / alAshrafiyya (1978), Palestinians and Peace / Les
Palestiniens et la paix / al-Finastiniyyun wa
al-salam (1978). Short films include El Naims
Journey / La route dEl Nam / Tariq al-naim
(1981, 54'), Maaloul Celebrates Its Destruction
/ Maloul fte sa destruction / Maaloul tahtafel
bidamariha (1984, 30'), Mixed Marriages in
the Holy Land / Mariages mixtes en terre sainte
/ Az-zawajo -l-mamnou fi-larabi-l-mokaddasa (1995, 50', Beta SP). Through his production company in Belgium, Marisa Films, he
has been involved in the production of his
own first two features, as well as those of other
INSAS graduates, such as the Tunisians Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud (Traverses, 1982) and
Nejia Ben Mabrouk (La trace, 19831988). He
won the top prize, the Tanit dor, at the JCC in
Tunis in 1988, with his second feature, Wedding in Galilee. Feature films: Fertile Memory
/ La mmoire fertile / Al-dhkira al-khisba
(1980, 99', 16mm), Wedding in Galilee / Noce
en Galile / Urs fi al-Jalil (1987, 112', 35mm),
Canticle of Stones / Cantique de pierre / Nashid
al-hajjar (1989, 106', 35mm), Order of the Day
/ Lordre du jour (1993, 105', 35mm), The Tale
of the Three Jewels / Conte des trois diamants
/ Hikayat al-jawaher al-thalatha (1996, 107',
35mm), Road 181: Fragments of a Journey /
Route 181, fragments dun voyage en PalestineIsral (with Israeli director Eyal Sivan, 2004,
270', Beta SP).
Khory, Lina. Jordanian filmmaker. Short film:

West ... East (2006, 8').
Khouly, Kosa. Syrian filmmaker. After graduating from the Conservatoire de Thtre in
1999, he has acted in forty tlfilms, seven feature films and four plays. Short film: Script /
Scnario (2005, 30', Beta SP).
Khouri, Asma Ahmed. Emirati filmmaker.
Short documentary films: A Gift from God
(2002, 3', DV Cam), Rite of Passage (2002, 5',
DV Cam), Paths to Peace (2003, 5', DV Cam).
Khoury, Amal. Jordanian filmmaker. Resident in the United States. Short documentary
film: Dear Karlo (2000, 8', video).
Khoury, Buthina Canaan. Palestinan filmmaker. Short films: Women in Struggle /
Femmes en lutte / Nisa fi siraa (2004, 56', video), Marias Grotto / Magharat Maria (2007,
52', DigiBeta).
Khoury, Georges. Syrian filmmaker.
Feature film: If I Die Twice I Would Love You /
Je meurs deux fois je taimerais (1975, 35mm).
Khoury, Rina. Palestinan filmmaker. Short
films: Balala Land (2003), West End (2005).
Khoury, Samir. Lebanese filmmaker. He
studied filmmaking in Europe. Feature films:
The Lady with the Dark Glasses / La dame
aux lunes noires / Saydat al-akmar as-sawda
(1971), Wolves Do Not Eat Raw Meat / Les
loups ne mangent pas la chair frache / Ziab la
taakol al-lahm (1972, 35mm), Amanie Under
the Rainbow / Amanie sous larc en ciel / Amanie taht kaws kouzah (1984, 110').
Khoury, Talal. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
film: The Respectable Man / Lhomme respectable (2008, 13', video).
Kodeih, Rami. Lebanese filmmaker. Short fictional film: A Sheherazade Tale (2006, 22').
Konath, Ahmed Kabeer. Emirati Filmmaker.
Short films: Waves (2002, 9', Beta SP), A Soul in
a City (2005, 15', Mini DV).
Korki, Shawkat Amin. Iraqi filmmaker. His first feature was shown at the MEIFF in
2007. Feature film: Crossing the Dust / travers la poussire / Parinawa la ghobar (2006, 76',
35mm).
Koshav. Syrian filmmaker. Feature film:
Women Naked without Sin / Femmes nues sans
pch (1967, 35mm).
Kotait, Ghassan. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1973 in Lebanon, he studied filmmaking
at the Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) in Beirut. Graduation film at the Academy: After the
Silence / Aprs le silence (1996, 22', Beta SP).
Short fictional film: Lebanese Non-footage /
Non mtrage libanais (with Wissam Smayra,
2003, 13', 16mm).
Kreidieh, Amir. Lebanese filmmaker. Studied
at the Lebanese American University in Beirut. Documentary : Abandoned Children / Enfants abanonns (1997, 5', video).
Lababidi, Aseel. Saudi filmmaker. Born in
1986 in Riyadh, she studied at the American
University of Sharjah. Both her short films
were made in the UAE. Short films: Ashes of
Remorse (2006, 4', Mini DV), A Vivid Deception (2007, 7', Mini DV).
Labaki, Carmen. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
film: France in Lebanon / La France au Liban
(2001, 52', Beta SP).
Labaki, Nadine. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in 1974 in Lebanon, she studied at
IESAV in Beirut. Also an actress, she starred
in Philippe Aractingis The Bus (2005). She
made two short films during her studies, one
of which was 11 Pasteur Street / 11 rue Pasteur / 11, Shari Bastoor (1996, 12', video). She
also made a number of commercials and short
films featuring Middle Eastern singers. Feature film: Caramel (2007, 95', 35mm).
99
Labib, Hikmet. Iraqi filmmaker. Lived for
some time in Lebanon, the subject of some
of his films. Feature films: Autumn Leaves /
Feuilles dautomne / Awrak al-kharif (1963,
35mm), The Seven Oclock Train / Le train de
sept heures / Qitae al-saa sabaa (1963, 35mm),
Farewell Lebanon / Adieu Liban / Wadaan
ya Lubnan (1967, 35mm).
Lahham, Dureid. Syrian filmmaker. After studying physics at Damascus University,
graduating in 1958, he worked for 2 years as
a schoolteacher before deciding to become an
actor. He subsequently worked widely in theatre, television, and films. Together with Nouhad Kalahi he formed one of the Arab worlds
favorite comic teams, first on Syrian television, then in a series of 1960s Lebanese-Syrian
co-productions: The Pearl Necklace / Le collier
de perles / Akd al-loulou (1964, 35mm), Meeting at Palmyra / Rencontre Palmyre / Lika
fi tadmor (1965, 35mm), The Millionnaire / Le
millionaire (1965, 35mm), I Am Antar / Je suis
Antar / Ana Antar (1967, 35mm), One Plus One
(1971, 35mm), all directed by the Egyptian
expatriate, Youssef Maalouf, together with
a number made by Lebanese directors: The
Tramps / Les vagabonds / al-Charidan (with
Rida Myassar, 1966, 35mm), Love in Istanbul
/ Lamour Istamboul / Gharam fi Istambul
(with Tahsine Kawadri, 1966, 35mm), Hotel of
Dreams / Htel des rves / Foundok al-ahlam
(1966, Albert Najib), The Likeable Thief / Le
voleur sympathique / al-Loss al-zarif (1968,
Youssef Issa). In Syria, he played the lead in
Nabil al-Malehs Jealous James Bond / James
Bond le jaloux / Ghawar James Bond (1974)
and, in the 1980s, began directing his own
films. Feature films: Borders / Les frontires /
al-Hudud (1984, 110', 35mm), The Report / Le
rapport / al-Taqrr (1986, 35mm), The Attachment / al-mahabba (1990), Kafrun / Kafrun
(1991, 104', 35mm).
LAHOUD, ROMEO. Lebanese filmmaker.
Feature film: The Queen of Love / La reine de
lamour / Malikat al-hub (1972, 35mm).
100
Lebanon Film Collective. In July 2006 a

number of Lebanese filmmakers attending the
Biennale des Cinmas Arabes in Paris were
prevented from returning home by the outbreak of war. Their angry response resulted in
some twenty short videos, thirteen of which
were selected for screening by the Dubai International Film Festival under the title Videos Under Siege. The filmmakers involved included Akram Zaatari, Khalil Joreige, Joana
Hadjithomas, Danielle Arbid, Tina Baz, Michel Kammoun, Samar Mogharbel, Gregory
Buchakjian, Sabine El Chamaa, Ghassan Sahhab, Ahmad Ghsein, Rania Stephan, and Elie
Yazbek.
Maakaron, Myrna. Lebanese filmmaker.

Born in 1974, she has lived in Hamburg since
2002. She studied filmmaking at the Academy
of Fine Arts in Beirut and drama at the Sorbonne in Paris. She has worked as an actress
on stage since the age of 15 and has appeared
in a number of Lebanese films: Once upon a
Time Beirut, The Civilised, and The Kite, for
example. Short films: A Meeting / Une rencontre (1995, 6', 16mm), A Story for Adults / Conte
dadulte (1997, 14', Beta SP), Confusion (1997,
10', Beta SP), Little Sparrow / Kleiner Spatz
(2001, 5', Mini DV), 28 (2003, 1', Mini DV),
and the documentary BerlinBeirut (2003, 23',
Beta SP).
Littin, Miguel.* Chilean director (of Palestinian descent) who directed one Palestinian feature, set in Palestine during and after
World War I. Feature film: The Last Moon / La
ultima luna (2004, 105', 35mm).
Maalouf, Youssef.* Egyptian director

who followed a decade of Egyptian features
with a number of Lebanese films, LebaneseSyrian co-productions, and Syrian films. Those
from 1964 to 1967 are Lebanese-Syrian coproductions starring the Syrian comic duo of
Doured Lahham (later to direct Syrian films
himself) and Nouhad Kalahi. Feature films:
The Broken Wings / Les ailes brises / al-Ajniha
al-mutakassira (1962, 93', 35mm), Abou Selim, Messenger of Love / Abou Slim missaire
damour (1963, 35mm), The Pearl Necklace / Le
collier de perles / Akd al-loulou (1964, 35mm),
Meeting at Palmyra / Rencontre Palmyre /
Lika fi tadmor (1965, 35mm), The Millionnaire / Le millionaire (1965, 35mm), I Am Antar / Je suis Antar / Ana Antar (1967, 35mm),
The Outlaws / Les hors-la-loi (1967, 35mm, in
Syria). One Plus One / 1 + 1 (1971, 35mm, in
Syria), Journey of Love / Voyage damour (1972,
35mm, in Syria), Loves Subterfuges / Les subterfuges damour (1972, 35mm, in Syria).
Lotfi, Lotfi. Syrian filmmaker. He worked in

Syrian television from 1965 and made a number of documentaries: Sad Melody / Triste mlodie / al-Lahn-il hazin (1975), The Child and
the Sun / Le soleil et lenfant, The Persian Hill
/ La colline des Perses, The Alley of Suffering /
La ruelle des souffrances, In the Akba Prison
/ Dans la prison dAkba, Souk Sarouja (1989,
40').
Louis, Sarmad. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1972 in Lebanon, he studied filmmaking at
IESAV and, simultaneously, photography in
Beirut. He has worked as director of photography on a number of films of all kinds. He now
teaches at IESAV. Short films: Virtual Images
/ Images virtuelles (1995), a series of commercials for a publicity campaign, Baladi, baldati, baladyati (1998), Success Story (1999), The
Blue Line / La ligne bleue (2001), The Purple
Umbrella / Le parapluie mauve (2004, 11', DV
Cam).
Lutfi, Nabiha. Palestinian filmmaker. She was
affiliated with the PLO in Beirut and made
her film in the refugee camps in Lebanon.
Documentary: Because the Roots Will Not Die
/ Parce que les racines ne mourront pas / Lan
al-judhur lan tamut (1977).
Maasri, Mounir. Lebanese filmmaker

and actor. Feature film: Fate / Le destin / al
Kadar (1972).
Madanat, Adnan. Jordanian filmmaker. He
co-scripted Najdat Ismal Anzours Jordanian
feature, Oriental Story (1991). Short films: A
Report from Tel al-Zatar / Khabaron min Tel
al-Zatar (1976), Palestinian Visions / Visions
palestiniennes / Roa filastiniyyah (1977).
Madi, Sandra. Jordanian filmmaker. Short
documentary film: Full Bloom / Qamar 14
(2006, 46', Beta SP).
Madian, Hany. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at the American University of Sharjah.
Short films: Unsubscribe Me (with Nadeem A.
Saleh, 2007, 1', Mini DV), Epitaph (with Raz,
2007, 5', Mini DV).
Madvo, Jacques. Lebanese filmmaker. Documentary: Scattered by the Wind / Disperss par
le vent / Moubaatharoun fil hawa (1970, 18').
Mahanna, Seoud. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short documentary film: Said / Said (2001,
11', Beta SP).
Mahmood, Mohamed Noori. Emirati filmmaker, Short documentary film: Committees
of Reconciliation (2002, 20', Mini DV).
Mahmood, Talal. Emirati filmmaker. Born in
Sharjah, where he worked as a writer and actor
in theatre and film. Short films: Exist (2005, 7',
Mini DV), Summer Vacation (2006, 17', Mini
DV), 25 Cents (2006, 10', DV Cam), Rayhaan
(2008, 11', Mini DV).
Mahmoud, Catriona. Emirati filmmaker.
Short fictional film: Highschool Terror (2007,
7', DVD).
Mahmoud, Khaled. Emirati filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Bent Alnokhatha (2008, 17').
Makboul, Lina. Palestinian filmmaker. Based
in Sweden. Documentary: Leila Khaled: Hijacker (2005, Jordan, 58').
Malas, Mohamed. Syrian filmmaker.
Born in 1945 in Koneitra, he studied filmmaking at VGIK in Moscow. While in Moscow he shot three short films: The Dream of
a Small City / Hulm madinah saghira (1972),
The Seventh Day / al-Youm as-sabeeh (1973),
and his graduation film, Everybody Is In His
Place and Everything Is Under Control / Kullon
fi makanihi wa koll shay ala ma yuram sayyed
101
al-dhabit (1974). After his return to Syria, he
worked for Syrian television and also made
further short films and documentaries: Quneitra 74 / al-Konaytra 74 (1974, 20'), Memory
/ La mmoire / al-Zakira (1977, 25', 16mm) Euphrates / Euphrate / Furt (1975), The Dream /
Le songe / al-Manam (1987, 45', 16mm), On the
Sand, Under the Sun / Taahta al-rami, fawqa
al-shams (with Hala Yakoub, 1998, 36', Beta
SP), Sabri Mudallal, Magrams for Pleasure /
Sabri Mudallal, le semeur de voix (1998, 52',
Beta SP). He has won the top prize, the Tanit
dor, at the JCC in Tunis twice, in 1984 (City
Dreams) and in 1992 (The Night). His first feature was co-scripted with Samir Zikra and
his second with Oussama Mohammad. On
video, he directed, with Omar Amiralay and
Oussama Mohammad, two documentary portraits, Shadows and Light / Nouron wa thilal
(1995, 52', Beta SP) about veteran filmmaker
Nazih Shahbandar, and Fateh al-Moudarress
(1995, 52', Beta SP). He has also published a
novel, Publicity for a City / Publicit pour une
ville / Ialnat al madina, a number of articles,
scripts, and film diaries. Feature films: City
Dreams / Les rves de la ville / Ahlam al-Madina (1984, 120', 35mm), The Night / La nuit
/ al-Layl (1992, 115', 35mm), Passion / Bab elmaqam (2005, 98', 35mm).
Mamdouh, Mohammed. Emirati filmmaker.
Born in Egypt but raised in the UAE, he studied at the American University of Sharjah.
Short films: Rise and Fall (2006, 14', Mini DV),
An Emirati Dilemma (2007, 7', Mini DV), Hit
and Run (2007, 8', DVD), The Fallen (2008, 13',
HDV).
Manea, Ali. Emirati filmmaker. Short animated film: The Cat and the Smoke (2008, 6',
DVD).
Mansour, Aseel. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. Born in 1977 in Baghdad, of Palestinian
origin, he moved to Jordan in 1991. He later
studied engineering at the University of Jordan and works as an IT consultant in Dubai.
Short filmsone a documentary: Nightmares
102
of Reality (with Razan Khatib, 2003, 5', DV

Cam), and three short fictional films: Alert
Guns (2004, 11', Mini DV), Little Feet (2006,
8', Mini DV), Pummelo (with Yahya Abdullah,
2008, 29', DigiBeta).
Mansour, Carol. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1961 in Beirut, she worked for 10 years as
editor, director, and producer in Lebanese
television before founding her own media
production company, Forward Productions.
Documentaries: 100% Asphalt / 100% asphalte
(2002, 26', Beta SP), Maid in Lebanon (2005,
25', DV Cam), A Summer Not to Forget (2007,
27').
Maraana, Erbisam. Palestinian filmmaker.
Documentary: Paradise Lost (2003, 56').
Marcos, Norma. Palestinian filmmaker. Born
in 1951 in Nazareth, she has lived in Paris
since 1977. She worked as assistant on a number of productions, co-directing a documentary Bethlehem Under Surveillance / Bethlem
sous surveillance (1990) for Canal Plus. She
has also worked as a film critic. Documentary
films: Veiled Hope / Lespoir voil / al-Amal alghamid (1994, 55', 16mm), Land Development
(1999, 15', video), Waiting for Ben Gurion / En
attendant Ben Gourion (2006, 30', video).
Marie, Yasmine. Emirati filmmaker, Of
Egyptian origin, but brought up in Dubai, she
Short fictional film: 5:08 (2006, 3', Mini DV).
Masharawi, Rashid. Palestinian filmmaker. Born in 1962, in the Shatila refugee
camp in Gaza, he moved to Tel Aviv at the
age of 12 to help support his family by taking on a succession of menial jobs. He began
work in film at 18 and made his first shorts,
Partners (1981), Travel Document / Passeport /
Jawaz dafar (1986, 20'), and The Shelter / Labri
/ al-Malja / (1989). He followed these with
several documentaries: Long Days in Gaza
/ Longues journes Gaza / Lyaam tsawila fi
Gaza (1991, 30'), House, Houses / Une maison,
des maisons / Dar wa dr (1991, 52'), The Magi-
cian a.k.a. Enchanting / Le magicien / as-Sahr

(1992). In 1993, he moved to the Netherlands
for 3 years, returning to Ramallah to found a
film production center there in 1996. Further
documentaries: Waiting / Lattente / Enewar
(1994, 90'), Rebab (1997, 20', video), Stress /
Tension / Tawattur (1998, 26', video), Against
the Walls / Khalaf al-aswar (1999), The Land
of Palestine / Filastin, ard al-miyad (1999),
Out of Focus / Ghabash (2000), Upside Down
/ Makloub / Maqluba (2000, 6', Beta SP), Live
From Palestine / En direct de Palestine / Hona
sawto filistin (2001, 53', Beta SP), Hummus for
the Festival / Hummus al-eid (2003, 12'), Arafat, My Brother / Arafat, mon frre (2005, 52',
video), Meters Away (2005). He won the prize
for first feature at the second Biennale des Cinmas Arabes in Paris in 1994. Feature films:
Curfew / Couvre-feu / Hatta isaar akhar (1993,
75', 35mm), Haifa / Hafa / Haifa (1996, 75',
35mm), Season of Love / La saison de lamour
/ Mawsim hubb (2001), A Ticket to Jerusalem
/ Un ticket pour Jrusalem / Tathkararaton ila
al-Quds (2002, 85', 35mm), Waiting / Attente
/ Intizar (2006, 90', 35mm), Lailas Birthday /
Lanniversaire de Laila / Eid milad Laila (2008,
71', 35mm).
Mashareqa, Tayseer. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short film: Mariams Dog / Kalb Maryam
(with George Khleifi, 2004).
Mashi, Mubarack. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied at the Higher College of Technogy,
Abu Dhabi Mens College. Sahort film: The
Mistake (2007, 41').
Masri, Ma. Palestinian filmmaker. Wife
of the Lebanese documentarist Jean Chamoun. Born in 1959 in Amman in Jordan, she
studied in the film department of San Francisco University. She has made a series of films
with Jean Chamoun mostly situated in Lebanon: Under the Debris / Sous les dcombres /
Tahatal ankad (1983, 40', 16mm), Wild Flowers: Women of South Lebanon / Fleurs dajonc:
Femmes du Sud du Liban / Zahrat al-qandal
(1986, 71', 16mm), War GenerationBeirut
/ Beyrouth, gnration de la guerre / Jil alharb (1988, 50', 16mm), Children of Fire / Les
enfants du feu / Atfl jabal al nr (1990, 50',
16mm), Suspended Dreams / Rves suspendus
/ Ahlam muallaqa (1992, 50', 16mm), Frontiers
of Dreams and Fears / Frontires du rve et de
la peur / Ahlam al-manfa (2001, 56', video),
Land of Women / Terre de femmes (2004). Solo,
she has made Hanan Ashwari, a Woman of Her
Time / Hana Ashwari: femme de son poque /
Hanan Ashrawi ... Imraa fi zaman al-Tahaddi (1995, 50', Beta SP), Children of Shatila / Les
enfants de Chatila / Atfl Shatila (1998, 47', Beta
SP), Dreams of Exile / Rves dexil (2001), The
Magic Lantern / La lanterne magique (2004),
Comedy in the Line of Fire / Sourire en flammes
(2006), Reviving Memory / La mmoire renaissante (2006). Feature-length documentaries:
Beirut: Truth, Lies and Videos / Chroniques de
Beyrouth: vrits, mensonges et videos (2006,
76', DV Cam), 33 Days / 33 jours / 33 yaoum
(2007, 70', Beta SP).
Massad, Mahmoud. Jordanian filmmaker.
Born in 1959 in Zarqa, to exiled Palestinian
parents, he studied art and cinema at Yarmouk University in Jordan and travelled to
Germany and the Netherlands. From 1988
he lived in Europe: Romania, Italy, Germany,
and, from 1995, in the Netherlands. He returned to Jordan in 2003. Short films: Human
Landscape (1998), Block B / Le bloc B (1998),
The Mercator Carter (1999), Hassan the Smart
/ Shater Hassan (2001, 40', Beta SP), Once upon
a Time in the Middle East (2004, 3', DV Cam).
Feature-length documentary: Recycle / Recyclage / Eaadat khalk (2007, 80', HDV transferred to 35mm).
Matalqa, Amin. Jordanian filmmaker.
Born in 1976 in Amman, he emigrated to the
United States (where he still lives) at the age
of 13. He lived in Columbus, Ohio, and studied at Ohio State University before moving to
Los Angeles, where he made some twenty-five
short films and studied at the American Film
Institute. Feature film: Captain Abu Raed / Le
capitaine Abu Raed (2007, 95', 35mm).
Matar, Mohammed. Emirati filmmaker.
Short film: Equality (2006, 2', video).
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Matloub, Reem. Emirati filmmaker. Grew up
in Baghdad and studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short film: A Blur of Perfection (2006, 6', Mini DV).
Mer-Khamis, Juliano. Palestinian filmmaker. His first documentary is a study of the
children who studied at the drama school run
by his mother, the activist Arna Mer-Khamis.
Feature-length documentary: Arnas Children
/ Les enfants dArna / Atfal Arna (2004, 84',
Beta SP).
Mesalatie, Bassam. Emirati filmmaker. Studied at the University of Al-Ain, UAE. Short
films: Zionism Campaign (with Samia al-Ghaferi, 2006, 22', HD), For the Sake of Democracy
(with Samia al-Ghaferi, 2007, 5', HD), For Release (with Samia al-Ghaferi, 2007, 5', HD),
Small Terrorists (with Samia al-Ghaferi, 2007,
7', HD).
Mesalatie, Osama. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied at the University of Aleppo, Syria,
and also took course in theatre directing and
animation. He has also scripted several short
films. Short films: All Set to Go (2007, 4', DVD),
Bush Here! (2008, 5', DV Cam).
Meshmeshy, Ahmed. Emirati filmmaker. He
Short film: Wide Awake (2006, 6', Mini DV).
METNI, JAWAD. Lebanese filmmaker. Feature-length documentary: Remnants of a War
/ Les restes dune guerre (2009, 77').
Midani, Hind. Syrian filmmaker. She studied filmmaking in Moscow and also made
tlfilms for Syrian and Gulf television. Short
documentary film: A Distant Look / Regard
distance (1986, 45').
Miqdadi, Hadeel. Emirati filmmaker. Born
in 1986 in Abu Dhabi, of Palestinian origins. Studied at the American University of
Sharjah. Short fictional film: The Unexpected
(2006, 5', Mini DV).
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Mitri, Reine. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in

1970 in Lebanon, she initially studied business management, but has since worked in
documentary production and cinclub organization. She studied at FEMIS in Paris, where
she made her first documentary. Short films:
About the Pear / propos de la poire (2001),
Querido (2003), The Sound of Footsteps on the
Pavement (2004, 52', Mini DV).
Mobarak, Abdel Hadi. Iraqi filmmaker. Feature film: The Bride of the Euphrates /
La marie de lEuphrate / Aros al-forat (1961,
35mm).
Mogharbei, Samar. Lebanese filmmaker.
Contributed The War on Lebanon in the Eyes
of the Kids (3') to the collective project Videos
Under Siege (DIFF 2008, 39', video).
Mohamed, Ahmed Fath al-Bab. Emirati
filmmaker. Short films: To Whom It May Concern (2001, 18', Beta SP), Marriage Fund (2003,
14', Beta SP).
Mohamed, Fatima Saif. Emirati filmmaker.
Short film: Rumour (2005, 3', Mini DV).
MOHAMED, HATEM. Syrian filmmaker.
Feature film: The Long Night / La longue nuit
(2009).
Mohamed, Salah Eddine. Syrian filmmaker.
He is also an architect and art critic. He has
made a number of documentaries about Syrian art and culture, including the two-part The
Horizon of Civilizations / Lhorizon de civilisations (1992, 48' + 60').
Mohammad, Oussama. Syrian filmmaker. Born in 1954 at Lattakieh, he graduated from VGIK, the Moscow film school, in
1979. His graduation film was Step by Step /
Khutwa Khutwa (1978, 22'). He made a number of short films and documentaries in Syria:
Today and Every Day / Aujourdhui et tous les
jours / al-Yawn wa kullu yawm (1981 20'), The
Violets Are Dead / Les violettes sont mortes
(1982). He co-directed, with Mohamed Ma-
las and Omar Amiralay, two video portraits:

Shadows and Light / Nouron wa thilal (1995,
52', Beta SP), on the pioneer filmmaker Nazir
Shahbandar, and Fateh al-Moudarress (1995,
52', Beta SP). He also co-scripted Malass The
Night. Feature films: Stars in Broad Daylight /
toiles du jour / Nujum al-nahar (1988, 105',
35mm), The Cabinet of Life a.k.a. Peep Show /
Le coffre de la vie a.k.a. Sacrifices / Sanduq aldunia (2001, 113', 35mm).
Mohammed, Fatima. Emirati filmmaker.
Studied media production at the Dubai Womans College and directed several television
programes. She currently works for Dubai TV.
Short films: Dubai Womens Society (2001, 5',
DigiBeta), Green Windows (2001, 8', DigiBeta),
Al-Hazar El-Shadee (2002, 60', Beta).
Mohammed, Hala. Syrian filmmaker. Born in
Lattakiya, she is also a poet and journalist. She
studied filmmaking at the Universit de Paris
VIII and has worked for the Hot Spot program of Al Jazeera. Documentaries: Divorce
and Marriage / Divorce et mariage, For a Little
Piece of Cake / Pour un petit morceau de gteau
(2005, 52', Beta SP).
Mohammed, Jassem. Emirati filmmaker.
Short film: Waste Management in Dubai
(2006, 9', DV Cam).
Mohammed, Mohammed Ibrahim. Bahraini
filmmaker. Short film: Burning Flowers (2009,
23', HD Cam).
Mohammed, Salwa. Emirati filmmaker of
Tunisian origin. Short film: Always Happen in
16.9 (with Amina Ataya, 2007, 11', Mini DV, in
Egypt).
Mohammed, Yasmin. Emirati filmmaker. She
studied multimedia design. Short films: Sever
(2005, 41', Mini DV), Room 21 (2005, 6', Mini
DV).
Mohd, Reem. Emirati filmmaker. She studied
experimental film: Confiscated Footage (with
Mina Eltaieb, 2004, 10', Mini DV).
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Moon, Farha. Emirati filmmaker. Short films:

Revolutionary Fools (2007, 4', Mini DV), AntiGendercide (with Naima Abdelwahed, 2007, 1',
Mini DV).
Muadhdhen, Marwan. Syrian filmmaker.

He made a documentary on Palestine. Documentary: Joyous Celebrations / Joyeuse fte / Id
said (1970).
Morsi, Ahmed Kamel.* Egyptian filmmaker responsible for one of the first Iraqi feature films: Leila in Iraq / Layla en Irak / Layla
fi al Irak (1948).
Muhammad, Hashim. Kuwaiti filmmaker. Born in 1945, he worked in Kuwaiti

television from 1973 and subsequently for the
BBC. He made a number of documentaries,
including The Arts / Les arts / al-Funn (1974).
Feature film: The Silence / Le silence / al-Samt
(1979).
Mostafa, Ali F. Emirati filmmaker. He grew

up in Dubai, with an English mother and UAE
father, and studied from 2003 to 2005 at the
London Film School, where he made six short
films. Since his return, he has worked on commercials. Short films in UAE: Scarred (2002,
Mini DV), Under the Sun / Taht el Shams
(2005, 23', 16mm).
Mostafa, Niazi.* Egyptian filmmaker
responsible for one of the first Iraqi feature
films: Son of the East / Le fils de lOrient / Ibn
al-Chark (1945).
Mouarkech, Pierre. Lebanese filmmaker.
Short fictional film: A Moonfish in the Waters
of Lebanon / Un poisson lune dans les eaux du
Liban (2000, 12').
Musallam, Isidore. Palestinian filmmaker. Born in Haifa, he studied at York University in Toronto, where he now lives. His
first four features were made in Canada. Short
films: Foreign Nights / Layali al-ghurba (1989),
Nothing to Lose / Rien perdre (1994), Heaven
Before I Die / al-Jinnaqalb mawti (1997), Adam
and Eve / Adam et Eve / Adam wa Hawwa
(2003), A Simple Story (2008, animation, 32',
35mm). Feature film: Today and Tomorrow
/ Aujourdhui et demain / Keif al-hal (2005,
35mm, in Saudi Arabia).
Mouchechawi, Ramez. Syrian filmmaker.

Documentary: The Waterpumps of Hama / Les
norias de Hama (1990, 40').
Musleh, Hanna. Palestinian filmmaker. Born

in Beit Jala, Palestine. Studied at univerities in
Leningrad and Manchester. Returned to teach
at Bethlehem University in 1980. Short films:
Sahars Wedding / La noce de Sahar / Urs Sahar (1992, 42'), Army of God / Larme de Dieu
/ Jund allah (1995, 54'), Im a Little Angel / Je
suis un petit ange / Ana malik saqir (2000, 40',
Beta SP), Living with Dignity / Vivre dignement
/ al-Aysh bi karama (2002, 52', Beta SP), Tear
of Peace (2003, 34'), In the Spiders Web / Fi
shibak al-ankabut (2005, 40'), Memory of the
Cactus: A Story of Three Palestinian Villages
/ Thakirat al-sabbar: Hikayat thalath qura
Falasteenia (2008, 42', DV Cam).
Mroue, Rabih. Lebanese filmmaker. Short fictional film: Side A / Side B / Face A / Face B
(2002, 9').
Mustafa, Ahmad. Emirati filmmaker. He

Short film: The Pragmatist (2005, 7', DV Cam).
Mrwesh, Saud. Emirati filmmaker. Short fictional film: Roots and Seeds (2006, 9', Mini
DV).
Muthaffar, Enas. Palestinian filmmaker.

Born in 1977 in Jerusalem, she studied at the
Cairo Higher Film Institute and is based in
London, where she studied at Goldsmiths
Mouawad, Wajdi. Lebanese filmmaker.

He was born in 1968 in Beirut, where he spent
his childhood. He left Lebanon for France
during his adolescence and then moved to
Quebec, where he now lives. He trained at the
national theatre school of Canada, and he has
worked as an actor and stage director. Feature
film: Littoral (2004, 90', 35mm).
106
College. Short films: Vision / Ruya (1998), Together We Were Raised / Sawa rben (1999, 12',
35mm), Oh, Grandmother / Ah ya sitty (1999,
5', Beta SP), The Path of Sidi Omar / La route de
Sidi Omar / Sabil Sidi Omar (2000, 14', 35mm),
For the Archives Only / Pour les archives seulement (2001, 30', video), East to West / De lest
louest (2005). Contributed A World Apart
within 15 Minutes (3' 12") to the collective film
Summer 2006, Palestine (2006, 35', Beta SP).
Muwaddin, Mohamed. Syrian filmmaker.
Alongside Mohamed Shahin and Nabil alMaleh, he contributed one of three episodes,
Childbirth / Laccouchement / al-Makhad, to
the first feature produced by the National Organisation for Cinema: Men Under the Sun /
Des hommes sous le soleil / al-Sayyid al-taqaddumi (1970, 108', 35mm).
Myassar, Rida. Syrian-born Lebanese
filmmaker. Many of his films were LebaneseSyrian co-productions, and some made in
Syria. Feature films: The Rock of Love / Le rocher de lamour / Sakhar al-hub (1959, 35mm),
Loved by All / Aime de tous / Habitat al-kol
(1964, 35mm), Bitter Honey / Le miel amer /
al-Assal al-morr (1965, 35mm), Body on Fire /
Le corps en feu / Lahib al-jassad (1965, 35mm),
Sultana / Sultana (1966, 35mm), The Arab
Falcon / Le faucon des arabes / Sakr al-arab
(1966, 35mm), The Tramps / Les vagabonds /
al-Charidan (1966, 35mm), Do Not Touch My
Wife / Ne touche pas ma femme / Idak an
mrati (1967, 35mm), The Palestinian in Revolt
/ Le palestinien rvolt / al-Filastini al-thaer
(1969, 35mm), Girls to Love / Des filles aimer / Banat lil hob (1972, 35mm), The Shrews /
Chipies / Banat akker zamane (1972, 35mm),
The Gypsy in Love / La gitane amoureuse / alGhajaria al-achika (1972, 35mm), Fire Woman
/ Femme de feu / Imraa min nar (1973, 35mm),
A Forced Marriage / Un mariage forc (1973,
35mm) in Syria, Valuable Game / Gibier de
valeur / al-Istiyad al-kabir (1974, 35mm), Voyage of Suffering / Voyage des souffrances (1974,
35mm) in Syria, A Nightingale in Lebanon /
Un rossignol du Liban / Boulbol min Loubnan
(1982, 35mm), Mothers Suffering / La souffrance des mres / Azab al-oumahat (1982,
35mm), The South in Revolt / Le sud rvolt

a.k.a. Le sud insurg / al-Janoub al-thaer (1984,
35mm).
Naassani, Nasser. Syrian filmmaker. Short
animated film: Him and Her / Elle et lui (1995,
4', 35mm).
Nabhan, Mohammed. Emirati filmmaker.
Born in 1982 in Sharjah, of Palestinian origin,
he studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short film: Love vs. Death (2004, 7', Mini
DV).
Nabulsi, Yasmine Fawaz. Emirati filmmaker.
Born in 1985 in Amman, Jordan, but raise in
the UAE. She studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short fictional film: Perfect
(2004, 4', Mini DV).
Naccache, Tina. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
film: Who Hangs the Laundry? Washing, War
and Electricity in Beirut (with Icelander Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdottir, 2002, 20', Beta SP).
Nacer, Jamil. Yemeni filmmaker. Documentary: The New Yemen / Le nouveau Ymen
(1975).
Nadda, Ruba. Syrian filmmaker. Based
in Canada. She made eleven internationally
screened short fictional films in 19971999:
Interstate Love Story (1997, 4', 16mm), Wet
Heat Drifts through the Afternoon (1997, 8',
16mm), Do Nothing (1997, 4' 16mm), So Far
Gone (1998, 1', 16mm), The Wind Blows towards Me Particularly (1998, 5' 16mm), Damascus Nights (1998, 17', 16mm), Slut (1999, 5',
16mm), Laila (1999, 5', 16mm), I Would Suffer Cold Hands for You (1999, 3', 16mm), Blue
Turning Grey Over You (1999, 5', 16mm), Black
September (1999, 5', 16mm). Other short film:
Aadan (2004, 8', 35mm). Feature film (tracing
the tensions of immigrant life in exile): Sabah
(2004, 90', 35mm).
Naguib, Albert.* Egyptian filmmaker
who directed one Lebanese feature film: Hotel
of Dreams / Htel des rves / Foundok al-ahlam
(1966, 35mm).
Nahas, Walid. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
film: Marriages and Childhood in Lebanon /
Mariages et enfance au Liban (2004, 24', Super8).
Naim, Oscar. Lebanese filmmaker. Documentary: Grand Theater: A Tale of Beirut
(2000, 28', 16mm).
Najeeb, Mohamed. Emirati filmmaker. Fictional film: A Place at Heart (1996, 86', Beta
SP).
Najjar, Najwa. Palestinian filmmaker.
Born in 1965 in Washington, D.C., to Palestinian parents, she studied politics and economics before taking training in filmmaking.
She lives currently in Jerusalem. Short films:
Women in Development (1995, 2 x 12', Beta
SP), Jerusalem: Dealmaker or Dealbreaker
(1995, 30', Beta SP), Sesame Street (1997, video
clips), Naim and Wadeea / Naim et Wadeea /
Naim wa Wadeea (1999, 20', Beta SP), A Boy
Called Mohamed / Un garon nomm Mohamed / Walad ismuhu Muhammad (2001, 10',
video), Jewel of Oblivion a.k.a. Quintessence of
Oblivion / Quintessence de loubli / Jawharat
al-silwan (2001, 45', Beta SP), They Came from
the East / Ils sont venus de lest (2004, 3'), Yasmines Song / La chanson de Yasmine / Yasmine
tughani (2006, 18', Beta SP). She also contributed one episode to the collectively made video documentary One More Time (Five Stories
about Human Rights in Palestine / Une fois
encore (cinq histoires sur les droits de lhomme
en Palestine) (with Nada al-Yassir, Tawfik Abu
Wael, Abdel Salam Shehada, Ismal Habash,
2002, 57', Beta SP). Feature film: Pomegranates
and Myrrh / La grenade et la myrrhe / Al-Mor
wa al-rumman (2008, 95', 35mm, in Lebanon).
Najjar, Razi. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
film: Pickled! (2008, 16'). Contributed To the
Arabs of Haifa, a Special Message ... (1' 17")
to the collective film Summer 2006, Palestine
(2006, 35', Beta SP).
Najmi, Said. Jordanian filmmaker. Short fictional film: The Other Side of My Neighbourhood (2007, 12').
107
Nakkas, Olga. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1953 in Mersine (Turkey), she moved to Beirut at the age of 5 with her Turkish mother and
Lebanese father. She took a masters degree in
linguistics in the United States and a doctorate in English and Arabic literature in Paris.
She then worked as a journalist and producerdirector in London, Paris, and Beirut. Documentaries: Saida, Portrait of a City / Saida,
portrait dune ville (1986, 19', 35mm), Ashoura
/ Ashura (co-dir., 1987, 27', 35mm), Halima
(2000, 40', 35mm). Feature-length documentary: Lebanon: Bits and Pieces / Le Liban, fait
de pices et de morceaux a.k.a. Liban bout
bout / Lubnan min taraf ila taraf akhar (1994,
60', Beta SP).
Naous, Nadine. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentary: Everone His Own Palestine / Chacun sa Palestine (with Lna Rouxel, 2006, 52',
video).
Naser, Yaser. Bahraini filmmaker. Film and
television actor and director. Short film: The
Way to Delmon (2006, 16', Mini DV).
Nashashibi, Rosalind. Palestinian filmmaker.
Born in 1973 in the United Kingdom to Irish
and Palestinian parents. She is an award-winning experimental filmmaker. Short films: The
State of Things (2000, 16mm), Midwest (2001,
16mm), Humanjora (2001), District Post Office
/ Dahyat al-barid (2002, 16mm), Blood and
Fire (2003, 6', video), Hreash House, Eyeballing
(2005).
Nasir, Tariq. Jordanian filmmaker. Based in
the United States. Documentary: Belonging
(2006, 68').
Nasri, Samir.* Egyptian-born filmmaker
who directed two Lebanese 1960s feature
films. Born in 1937 in Egypt, he worked first as
a journalist. He worked as assistant to Youssef
Chahine on several Egyptian features, including A Man in My Life (1961) and Dawn of a
New Day (1964), as well as The Seller of Rings
(1965), which was a Lebanese production. He
moved to Beirut in the 1960s, where he worked
108
for a time as film critic for two newspapers,

before turning to film direction. He made a
short documentary about the sufferings of the
Southern Lebanese, The South in the Claws of
the Enemy / Le sud entre les griffes de lennemi
/ al-Janoub fi barthen al-aada (1970, 15'). He
died in 1990. Feature films: Youth in the Sun /
Jeunesse au soleil / Chabab tahtal cham (1966),
The Victory of the Vanquished / La victoire du
vaincu / Intissar al-mounhazem (1966).
Nassar, Ali. Palestinian filmmaker. Born
in 1954 in the village of Arrabeh in Galilee,
he developed a passion for film at an early age.
He received a scholarship to study at VGIK,
the Moscow film school, where he graduated
in 1981. He later worked as a journalist and
photographer and directed an Arab theatre
company in Haifa. Documentaries: The City
on the Coast / La ville sur la cte / Hilat madina ala al-shati (1985), The Source of the Gift
/ La source intarissable / Nahaa alata al-daim
(1992, 55', 16mm). Feature films: The Wet
Nurse / La nourrice / al-Mardhaah (1993), The
Milky Way / La voie lacte / Dar al-tabbanat
(1997, 105', 35mm), In the Ninth Month / Au
neuvime mois / Bahodesh hatshii (2002, 106',
35mm).
Nasser, Georges. Lebanese filmmaker.
Born in 1927 in Tripoli, he began by studying architecture at the University of Chicago
but then turned to filmmaking, completing
his diploma at UCLA. He continued making
documentaries throughout his feature career:
IPC in Tripol (1955), Water Skiing Championship in Beirut / Championnat de ski nautique
Beyrouth (1956), Work in Progress (1958),
This Ancient City of Byblos / Cette ancienne
cit, Byblos (1962), Taming of the Iron (1963),
Let the She-Goat Graze in Peace / Pour que la
chvre paisse en paix (1968, Anti-Tank Attack
/ Assault anti-char (1968), Son, I am Proud /
Mons fils, je suis fier / Waladi, an fakhrun
(1968), The Military School / Lcole militaire
(1969), Watch from the Sky / Vigie du ciel
(1970), Handicraft in Lebanon / Lartisanat en
Liban / Al-hiraf al-lubnniya (1972), Holiday
in Lebanon / Vacances en Liban (1973). His
debut feature film was the first Lebanese film

to be shown at Cannes (in 1957), but achieved
little success at home. As a result, Nasser shot
his second feature in French hoping, in vain,
to attract an elite audience. His third and final film was a Syrian co-production. Feature
films: Towards the Unknown / Vers linconnu /
Ila ayn (1958, 90', 35mm), The Little Stranger /
Le petit tranger (1961, 35mm), A Man Is Needed / On demande un homme / Matlb rajulun
wahid (1975, 35mm).
Nasser, Haifa. Emirati filmmaker. She studied at Dubai Womens College. Short film:
Color (2006, 2', Mini DV).
Naysi, Majid. Emirati filmmaker. Born in
Iran, but living in the UAE. Short documentary film: My Friend, Mr. Bull (2005, 21', Mini
DV).
Nazari, Bahman. Emirati filmmaker. Born
in 1977, he has worked in animation. Short
animated film: From Apple to Apple (2004, 11',
video).
Nazzal, Omar. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
film: The Cage (2004).
Nicolas, Carine. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
film: Malaika (2001, 16', video).
Nimr, Samir. Iraqi filmmaker. He was
born in 1942 in Iraq, but most of his films
deal with issues relating to Palestine and were
made for Palestinian organizations. He began with documentaries before moving on to
feature-length works. He subsequently moved
to Tunisia, where he continued working as a
documentarist. Short films and documentaries: Zionist Terrorism / Le terrorisme sioniste / al-Irhb al-subyn (1973, 22', 16mm),
Palestinian Night / Nuit palestinienne / Layla
filastniya (1973, 16mm), The Four-Day War /
La guerre de quatre jours / Harb al-ayyam alarbaa (1973, 35', 16mm), The New Yemen / Le
nouveau Ymen / al-Yeman al-jadid (1974), The
Winds of Freedom / Les vents de la libration
/ Rih al-tahrr (1974, 35', 16mm), Who Is the
Revolution For? / Pour qui la rvolution? / Liman al-thaura? (1974, 20', 16mm), Kafr Chuba
/ Kafr Shba (1975, 35'). Features: Victory in
His Eyes / La victoire dans ses yeux / Al nasr
fi unynihim (1976), The War in Lebanon /
La guerre au Liban / Harb Lubnn (1977, 75',
35mm), The Children of Palestine / Les enfants
de Palestine / Affl Filasyn (1977), Roots / Racines / al-Judhur (1984), Palestine on Fire / La
Palestine en feu / Filastin fi al-lahb (1988).
Noor, Ahmad. Emirati filmmaker. Born in
1984, he studied at the American University of
Sharjah. Short films: His Chance, My Chance,
His Chance (2004, 18', video), The Steps (2004,
9, DV Cam).
Noor, Hamdah Hassan. Emirati filmmaker.
film: Predicting the Future (2005, 2', Mini DV).
Noujam, Rym. Lebanese filmmaker. Studied
at ALBA. Short fictional film: Natasha (2000,
10').
Noureddine, Wael. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in Lebanon, he studied filmmaking in Beirut
and worked as a journalist. Short documentaries: The Man with the Camera / Lhomme la
camra (2000), From Beyrouth with Love / a
sera beau (2005, 29', Beat SP), July Trip (2006,
35', Beta SP).
Numan, Mohamed. Bahraini filmmaker.
Short fictional film: Behind You (2006, 7').
Obaid, Ahmed Abdulqader. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at Dubai Mens College. Short films: Dodgy (2002, 1', DV Cam),
Crashed-Up Cars (2002, 1', DV Cam).
Odeh, Joud. Emirati filmmaker. He studied
film: Choose Your Path (with Kalid Mahmoud
Abu Goumazah, 2007, 1', Mini DV).
Odeh, May. Palestinian filmmaker. Short documentary film: When Walls Speak (2008, 16').
Contributed Called Off / Ferkesh (1' 37") to the
109
collective film Summer 2006, Palestine (2006,
35', Beta SP).
Ohisi, Ahmed Farouk. Syrian filmmaker,
Documentary: Petrol in the Battle / La ptrole
dans la bataille / al-Bitrl fi-l harb (1974).
Omran, Salha. Emirati filmmaker. Studied
media at UAE University, then worked as a reporter. Short films: The Story of Piracy (2005,
10', Beta SP), The Prisoner (2005, 1', DigiBeta),
Birthday (2007, 6', Mini DV).
Oqabi, Hamid. Yemeni filmmaker. He studied cinema and theatre as well as radio and
television (the latter in Baghdad). He worked
at the College of Fine Art in Yemen. Short
film: Al-Ritaj (2006, 34', Mini DV).
Oqaili, Jasim Ali. Saudi filmmaker. Short
films: A Dream: The Life (2008, 7', Mini DV),
After the Ashes (2008, 9', Mini DV).
Orsan, Ayman. Syrian filmmaker. Short fictional film: Behind the Faces / Derrire les visages (2005, 35').
Oubassi, Farouk. Syrian filmmaker. Documentary: Ebla (1978, 45').
Ousseimi, Maria. Lebanese filmmaker. Debut documentary: Lost Childhood / Enfance
perdue (with Lamia Abu Haidar, 1992, 40',
16mm).
Pachachi, Maysoon. Iraqi filmmaker.
Born in 1947 in Washington, D.C., where
her father was a diplomat, she was educated
in Iraq, the United States, and the United
Kingdom, studying philosophy and film. She
settled in the United Kingdom, where she
worked in alternative theatre and as a film editor for television. In 2003, with Kassim Abid,
she set up an Independent Film & TV College in Baghdad. After a short fictional film,
Strike 36 (1973, 35mm), she began her career
as a documentary filmmaker in the late 1980s.
Documentaries: Voices of Gaza / Voix du Gaza
(1989), Iraqi Women . . . Voices from Exile /
110
Les Iraqiennes ... une voix de lexil (1993, 38',

35mm), Smoke (with Lucia Nogueira, 1996, 5'),
Living with the Past: People and Monuments in
Medieval Cairo / Vivre avec le pass (2001, 56').
Documentary feature films: Iranian Journey
/ La femme-chauffeur, une traverse en bus
de lIran (1999, 60', video), Bitter Water / Eau
amre (with Noura Sakkaf, 2003, 76', video),
Return to the Land of Wonders / Retour au
pays des merveilles (2004, 88', Beta SP), Our
Feelings Took the Pictures: Open Shutters Iraq
/ Nos sentiments ont pris les images: images de
lIrak (2008, 102', DigiBeta).
Palestinian Filmmakers Collective. Thirteen filmmakers, all living in Palestine, came
together to each contribute a short film (3' or
less) to make up a picture of Palestinian society: Summer 2006, Palestine (2006, 35', Beta
SP). The contributors are: Akram al-Ashqar,
Rowan al-Faqih, Amer Shomali, Ahmad Habash, Riyad Deis, Ismal Habash, Annemarie
Jacir, Liana Bader, Mohanad Yaqubi, Razi Najjar, Naher Awwad.
Qadh, Tony. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentary: Stolen Freedom ... Occupied Palestine / La libert vole ... la Palestine occupe /
al-Huriyya al-masluba ... Filastin al-muhtalla
(1990).
Qaed, Abdul Halim Ahmed. Emirati filmmaker. Born in 1974 in Dubai, he studied at
the Dubai Mens College and subsequently
worked in advertising. Short films (several of
them commercials): A Sony Man Lost (2000),
Professional Game (2000), The Art of Love
(2003, 1', Mini DV), The Delivery (2003, 8',
Mini DV), Watch, Listen Then Feel It (2004,
2', Mini DV), Cursed (2004, 12', Mini DV),
One Moment for God (2004, 1', Min DV), Mirage (2005, 20', Mini DV), Fear (2006, 14', DV
Cam).
Qashoo, Oussama. Palestinian filmmaker.
Documentaries: My Dear Olive Tree (2004),
Inside Outside (2005), No Choice Basis (2006),
Soy palestino / Ana falastini (2007, 65', DV
Cam).
Partamian, Antoine. Lebanese filmmaker.

Studied at ALBA. Short film: Explosion (2000,
12').
Qazi, Kristan. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentary: A Death in Lebanon / Une mort au

Liban / al-Mawt fi Lubnan (1977).
Pidutti, Jordano. Lebanese pioneer filmmaker. Born in Italy, he arrived in Lebanon at the
age of 24. He is the director of two pioneering
short films: The Adventures of Elias Mabrouk /
Les aventures dElias Mabrouk / Moughamarat
Elias Mabrouk (1929, 90') and The Adventures
of Abou Abeid / Les aventures dAbou Abeid /
Moughamarat Abou Abeid (1931, 35mm).
Qumasha, Saif Ben. Emirati filmmaker. Born

in 1986, he studied at the Dubai Mens College.
Short film: Brotherhood (with Ahmed Juma
Hassan, 2007, 2', DV Cam).
Politi, Edna. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentary: Coming from Abroad: Women Immigrants / Venues dailleurs: femmes immigres
(1983, 27').
Qader, Aseel. Jordanian filmmaker and member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative.
Short film: From Across the Oceans with Love
(2006).
Quttaineh, Ammar. Jordanian filmmaker

and member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. Born in 1976 in Kuwait of Palestinian / Jordanian descent, he lives in Amman.
He studied at the Applied Science University,
Jordan, and works as a stock broker. Short
films: Power Blues (2003), Tough Luck, (2004,
6', Mini DV), Overdose (2005, 14', Mini DV),
Sharar (with Saleh Kasem and Hazim Bitar,
2006, 17', Mini DV).
Raad, Riad Hani. Syrian filmmaker. He studied filmmaking and made several documentaries, including Mosaic / Mosaque (1990, 21'),
some fictional films, such as The Boots / Les
bottes, and a thirty-episode scientific television series called Scientific Horizons / Horizons scientifiques.
Raad, Walid. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1967 in Chibanieh, he has lived in Lebanon
and the United States. He is an independent
producer and teaches in the audio-visual department of Hampshire College in New York.
Short films: Up to the South / Vers le Sud-Liban
(with Jayce Salloum, 1993, 49', video), Missing
Lebanese Wars (1996), The Dead Weight of Suspended Quarrels / Le poids mort des querelles
suspendues (1999, 17', Beta SP), Hostage: The
Bachar Tapes (English Version) No. 17 & No. 31
(2001, 18', video).
RACHED, MARC ABI. Lebanese filmmaker.
Feature film: Help / Au secours (2009, 77'.).
Rached, Tahani. Lebanese filmmaker. Based
in Canada, Documentaries: Angry Wireless
/ La phonie furieuse (1982, 10', video), Beirut
Failing to Be Dead / Beyrouth dfaut dtre
mort (1983, 57', 16mm), Hait Nous La Nous
La (1987, 28', video), Au chic resto pop (1990,
84', video), Heart Doctors / Mdecins de cur
(1993, 110', video).
Rafeeq, Nesreen. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. Studied at the Lebanese American University in Lebanon. Short film: Model Blues
(2005).
Rafla, Helmi.* Egyptian director of one
Syrian feature film: A Useful Man / Un homme
convenable (1970, 35mm).
Ragheb, Roula. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1972, in Beirut, she studied at IESAV in Beirut
and at FEMIS in Paris, then worked in advertising. Short fictional film: Through Them /
travers elles / Abrahunn (1995, 10', 35mm).
Rahbani, Ghadi. Lebanese filmmaker.
He scripted and produced various fictional
films and co-directed his sole feature with his
brother, Marwan Rahbani. Feature film: At the
111
End of Summer / la fin de lt / Akher as saif
(1980, 35mm).
Rahbani, Marwan. Lebanese filmmaker.
He scripted and produced various films and
co-directed his sole feature with his brother,
Ghadi Rahbani. Feature film: At the End of
Summer / la fin de lt / Akher as saif (1980,
35mm).
Raheb, liane. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1972 in Lebanon, she studied filmmaking at
IESAV in Beirut, then worked as an editor and
assistant director. She teaches filmmaking and
is active in Beirut cultural organizations and
the Beirut Film Festival. Short fims and documentaries: The Crossing / La traverse (1994),
The Last Screening / La dernire sance / alArdh al-akhir (1995, 11', 16mm), Encounter /
Rencontre / Liqa (1996, 28', Beta SP), So Near,
Yet So Far / Si proche si loin / Qarib wa Baidi
(2001, 59', video), Suicide / Intihar (2003, 25',
DV Cam), I Desperately Need You (2005, 2',
DV Cam), Thats Lebanon / Cest a le Liban /
Haydha Lubnan (2008, 58', video).
Rahi, Maryam. Emirati filmmaker. Born in
1985 in Dubai, of Iranian descent, she studied
fictional films: Neglected Sight (2007, 2', Mini
DV), Stick Notes (2007, 5', Mini DV), The Reflection (2007, 3', Mini DV).
Rahman, Khalil Abdulwahed Abdul. Emirati filmmaker. Studied at Penn State University and Pennsylvania College of Technology.
Short experimental and video art films: Wadi
(2003, 3', DV Cam), Desert (2003, 4', DV Cam),
Driving (2004, 3', DV Cam), My Way (2005, 7',
Mini DV), Bicycles (2006, 5', video).
Ramadan, Wijan Mohammad. Emirati filmmaker. Born in Palestine, she was brought up
in Dubai. She studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short fictional films: Hope
(2004, 13', Mini DV), Silence (2004, 12', Mini
DV).
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Rashdan, Abdulla. Bahraini filmmaker.

Short film: Wooden Life (2005, 21', Mini DV),
Al-Dawama (2006, 21', Hi-8).
Rasheed, Hussein Abdul. Emirati filmmaker.
Born in 1984 in Kuwait of Egyptian origin, he
studied at the American University of Sharjah,
Short fictional films: Mish: Imbossible (2004,
7', Mini DV), September 12th (with Theyab
al-Tamimi and Hani Alireza, 2005, 11', Mini
DV).
Rasheed, Oday. Iraqi filmmaker. He made
the first feature film to be shot in Iraq after the
2003 war. Short film: An Entry to the Freedom
Memorial / Une entre au mmorial la Libert
(1999, 27', 35mm). Feature film: Underexposure / Sous-exposition / Ghair salih (2004, 67',
35mm).
Rashid, Mustafa. Syrian filmmaker. Feature film: The Lovers of the Demarcation Line
of the Rain / Les amants de la ligne de dmarcation de la pluie / Ushaq ala khat al-matar
(1993).
Rassam, Emmanuel. Iraqi filmmaker. Short
fictional film on Palestine: A Song / Une chanson / Ughniya (1964).
Raz. Emirati filmmaker. Short film: Epitaph
(with Hany Madian, 2007, 5', Mini DV).
Reda, Hassan.* Egyptian director of one
Syrian feature film: The Quiet City / La ville
tranquille (1972, 35mm).
Remy, Antoine. Lebanese filmmaker. He
studied at IDHEC and then at the Sorbonne
in Paris. On his return to Lebanon in 1962,
he worked in television, for which he made
Jerusalem Is in Our Thoughts / Jrusalem est
dans nos esprits / al-Quds fil bal (1967, 10').
Feature films (some of them Lebanese-Syrian co-productions): Chouchou and the Million / Chouchou and the Million / Chouchou
wal milion (1963, 35mm), For Women Only /
Pour femmes seulement / Lil nisaa fakat (1966,
35mm), Beirut 011 / Beyrouth 011 / Beyrouth
sifr hdaache (1967, 35mm), For You, Oh Palestine / Pour toi, Palestine / Fidaki ya Filestin
(1969, 35mm), The Beach of Love / La plage de
lamour / Chat al-hob (1974, 35mm).
Richa, Menem. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1959 in Lebanon, she studied physics, then
filmmaking at the cole Nationale Suprieure
Louis-Lumire in Paris. Short fictional film:
Mashi (1995, 3', 35mm).
Rosebiani, Jano. Iraqi filmmaker. His
sole feature film is the story of the building of
an orphanage in the Kurdish city of Halabja.
Feature film: Jiyan (2002).
Rum, Mohamed. Palestinian filmmaker.
Documentary: Jihad! (co-dir., 2004).
Saadi, Muhmud Ibrahim. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentary: Bleeding Memories /
Thikrayaton damiya.
Saed, Alabbas. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. He studied IT and works as teacher. Short
film: Free to Fly (with Sajeda Abousaif, 2006,
6'), I Love to Read (2007).
Saab, Jocelyne. Lebanese filmmaker.
Born in 1948 in Beirut. After studying economics at the Sorbonne in Paris, she worked
as a journalist for Lebanese television. She
then turned to making numerous documentaries, mostly in 16mm film, from a base in
Paris. She has also worked as assistant director to Volker Schlndorff (Dr Flscher / The
Forger). Documentaries: Portrait of Qaddafi
/ Portrait de Khadafi (1973, 52', 16mm), The
October Conflict / Guerre doctobre (1973, 15',
16mm), Syria: A Grain of Sand / Syrie, le grain
de sable (1973, 26', 16mm), Kurdistan / Irak: la
guerre au Kurdistan (1973, 35', 16mm), Palestinians Keep On / Les Palestiniens continuent
(1973, 26', 16mm), The Front of Refusal / Le
front du refus (1974, 10', 16mm), Palestinian
Women / Les femmes palestiniennes (1974, 12',
16mm), Portrait of a French Mercenary / Portrait dun mercenaire franais / Rasm shakhs
li-murtaziq farans (1975, 10', 16mm), The
Children of the War / Les enfants de la guerre /
Atfl al-harb (1976, 10', 16 and 35mm), Beirut,
Never Again / Beyrouth jamais plus (1976, 35',
16 and 35mm), Southern Lebanon: The Story
of a Village Under Seige / Sud-Liban, histoire
dun village assig (1976, 13', 16mm), For a
Few Lives / Pour quelques vies / Min ajli badu
al-hayt (1976, 20', 16mm), Egypt: The City
of the Dead / Egypte, la cit des morts / Misr:
madinatu al-mawt (1977, 35', 16mm), Letter
from Beirut / Lettre de Beyrouth / Risla min
Bayrt (1978, 50', 16mm), Iran: Utopia on the
March / Iran, lutopie en marche (1980, 50',
16mm), Beirut My City / Beyrouth ma ville /
Bayrt madnat (1982, 35', 16mm), Balance
Sheet of the War / Bilan de la guerre (1982, 10',
16mm), The Boat of Exile / Le bateau de lexil
/ Safina al-manfa (1982, 13', 16mm), Egypt:
The Architect of Luxor / Egypte, larchitecte de
Louxor (1986, 20', 16mm), Egypt: The Ghosts of
Alexandria / Egypte, les fantmes dAlexandrie
(1986, 17', 16mm), Egypt: The Cross of the Pharoah / Egypte, la croix des pharaons (1986, 20',
16mm), Egypt: The Love of GodFundamentalism / Egypte, lamour dAllahlintgrisme
(1987, 17', 16mm), The Lebanese, Hostages in
Their Own City / Les libanais tages de leur
ville (1987, 10', 16mm), The Female Killer / La
tueuse (1988, 6', 16mm), The Belly Dancers / Les
almes danseuses orientales (1989, 26', 16mm),
Fertilisation in Video / Fcondation in vido
(1991, video), The Lady from Saigon / La dame
de Sagon / Saida Saighon (1997, 60', video).
The Arabic title of her first fictional feature refers to a 1949 Egyptian film by Anwar Wagdi,
Gazal al-bant (Young Girls Flirtations). Features: Lebanon in Torment / Le Liban dans la
tourmente / Lubnn fi al-dawma (1975, 75',
16mm) (documentary), The Sahara Is Not
for Sale / Le Sahara nest pas vendre (1977,
90', 35mm) (documentary), A Suspended Life
a.k.a. Teenage Flirtation / Une vie suspendue
a.k.a. Ladolescente, sucre damour / Ghazal albant 2 (1985, 100', 35mm), Once upon a Time,
Beirut a.k.a. The Story of a Star / Il tait une
fois Beyrouth, histoire dune star / Kan ya ma
kan Beirut a.k.a. Qissah najmah (1994, 104',
113
35mm), Kiss Me Not on the Eyes / Dunia (2005,
112', 35mm).
Saad, Ammar. Iraqi filmmaker. Documentary: Damn Gun (2005, 30').
Saadeh, Mazen. Palestinian filmmaker. Born
in 1959 in Jordan, he now lives in Ramallah.
He began his career as a journalist and has
written novels and plays. He is also an actor
and appeared in Hanna Eliass Palestinian
feature The Olive Harvest (2002). After a first
short fictional film, Day and Night (2002), he
turned to documentary: The Bitter Choice, My
Friend, My Enemy / Mon ami, mon ennemi
(2004, 52', Beta SP), The Guardian of Boredom
(2005).
Sabah, Omar. Emirati filmmaker. He has
worked as editor on a number of short films.
Short animated film: My Grandfather (with
Mahmoud Yousouf al-Mashni, 2001, 4', Beta
SP).
Sabbagh, Osama Khalid. Emirati filmmaker.
Short documentary film: Abu Dhabi: The Past
and the Present (2002, 5', DV Cam).
SAEED, JOUD. Syrian filmmaker. Feature
film: Once More / Encore une fois / Mara okhra
(2009).
Saeed, Rawia Abdullah. Emirati filmmaker.
She studied at UAE University. Short films:
Bitter ... Sweet (2006, 3', DVC Pro), Before I
Grow Up (2008, 17', Mini DV).
Saeed, Reem. Emirati filmmaker. She studied
at Dubai Womens College. Short documentary film: El Youleh (2002, 7', Beta SP).
Saeed, Sameer. Emirati filmmaker. Short
film: Zayed: Dignity and Originality (with Mohamed Ashoor, 2001, 36', Beta SP).
SAEEDI, EBRAHIM. Iraqi filmmaker. He
worked as a cinematographer. Feature-length
documentary: All My Mothers / Toutes mes
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mres / Hamey-e madrana-e man (with Zahavi Sanjavi, 2009, 60').

Safadi, Akram. Palestinian filmmaker. Born
in 1962 in Jerusalem, he studied art and social science at the University of Bir Zeit in Palestine and filmmaking in Italy. Professional
work as a photographer and organizer of
photographic events. Three experimental videos (19911994) including Limits of a Dream
(1994, 4', DV). Documentary: Song on a Narrow Path: Stories from Jerusalem / La chambre
noire de Jrusalem / Qissas min al-Quds (2001,
52', Beta SP).
Safadi, Sami. Emirati filmmaker. He studied
films: The Robbery (2004, 7', Mini DV), The
Torture (2004, 3', DV Cam).
Safia, Bashir. Syrian filmmaker. He
studied filmmaking in Cairo and has worked
largely for the Syrian General Organisation for
Cinema. Short films: Mari (1972, 7'), Palmyra /
Palmyre (1972, 9'), Festival Love / Amour de festival. He also shot one episode, Slave / Escave /
al-Abd, of the collective film Shame / La honte
/ al-Ar (1974), with Wadeih Yousef and Bilal
al-Sabouni. Feature films: The Celebration / La
fte (1974, 35mm), The Jesters Love / Lamour
du bouffon / Gharm al-muharrij (1976,
35mm). The Manhunt / La chasse lhomme
/ Saydu al-rijl (1976, 35mm), Red, White and
Black / Le rouge, le blanc et le noir / al-Ahmar
wa al-abyad wa al-aswad (1977, 35mm), Love
for Life / Lamour pour la vie / Hubbun lil-hayt
(1981), Ghawars Empire (1982, 35mm).
Safwan, Jafar. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. He studies electrical engineering at
Jordan University. Short films: Out of Order
(2006, 5'), Air Palestine (2008).
Saghran, Hamad Abdulla. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at the Higher College of Technology, Ras Al-Khaimah Mens College. Short
film: Jet Stream (2005, 16', Mini DV), No for
Speed (2007, 1', Mini DV).
Said, Edward. Palestinian writer and intellectual, wrongly credited by some sources with
directing the documentary In Search of Palestine / En qute de Palestine (1998, 52'). This in
fact a BBC production, produced and directed
by Charles Bruce, for which he worked only as
presenter.
Said, Joud. Syrian filmmaker. Short film:
Monologue (2007, 14'), Farewell / Wadaan
(2008), 15').
Saimeh, Bassem. Emirati filmmaker. A Canadian citizen of Syrian origin and raised in
Japan, he studied at the American University
of Sharjah. Short film: Due Assignment (2005,
21', Mini DV).
Saimon, William. Iraqi filmmaker.
Worked as a cinematographer. Feature film:
Basra 11 Oclock / Basrah 11 heures / Basrah
saa daach (1964, 35mm).
SAKKAF, NOURA. Iraqi filmmaker. Documentary feature film: Bitter Water / Eau amre
(with Maysoon Pachachi, 2003, 76', video).
Salah, Mohamed. Syrian filmmaker.
Feature film: Three Operations in Palestine /
Trois Oprations en Palestine / Thalath amaliyyatdkhil Filistin (with Abderrahman alKhayali, 1969, 90', 35mm).
Salam, Lamis Yasir. Emirati filmmaker. She
was born in 1985 in Abu Dhabi and studied at
the American University of Sharjah. Short fictional films: Latch (2006, 7', Mini DV),Within
(2007, 3', Mini DV).
Salameh, Marwan. Palestinian filmmaker.
Documentary films: Aida / Aayda (1984, 22'),
The Olive Tree / Lolivier / Ahjarato-z-zaytoun
(1986, 20').
Salameh, Shirin. Palestinian filmmaker. Born in Cairo to Palestinian parents who
moved to Australia when she was 3 years
old. She worked as a journalist in Cairo and
as a foreign correspondent for ABC. Feature-
length documentary film: A Wedding in Ramallah / Un mariage Ramallah / Farah fi
Ramallah (2000, 90', Beta SP).
Salaris, Daniele. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
documentary film: The Beirut Apartment /
Lappartement Beyrouth (2007, 50').
Saleem, Hiner. Iraqi filmmaker. Born in
1964 in Aqrah in Iraqi Kurdistan, he fled the
regime of Saddam Hussein at the age of 16 and
spent 20 years as a political refugee, first in Italy and then in France, where he now lives. He
is also a novelist whose first novel, My Fathers
Rifle: A Childhood in Kurdistan, was published
in French in 2005 and translated into twenty
languages. His fourth feature was the first
Iraqi film to be shown at Cannes in competition. Feature films: Long Live the Bride ... and
the Liberation of Kurdistan / Vive la marie ...
et la libration du Kurdistan (1997), Beyond
Our Dreams / Passeurs de rve (1999), Vodka
Lemon / Vodka citron (2003), Kilometer Zero /
Kilomtre zro (2005, 85', 35mm), Beneath the
Rooftops of Paris / Sous les toits de Paris (2007),
Dol (2007).
Saleh, Katia. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1972 in Beirut, she is now resisident in England. She has made a number of doumentaries
produced Al Jazeera English: Beirut: All Flights
Cancelled 2006 (2006, 22'), Ashura: Blood and
Beauty (2006, 20'), The Singing Barber of Musul (2006), Organised Chaos (2007, 23'), Deadly
Playground (2007, 23').
Saleh, Kifaya. Iraqi fillmmaker. Studied at the
Independent Film and Television Academy
in Baghdad. Short documentary film: Hiwar
(2005, 12').
Saleh, Liana. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
film: A Ball and a Coloring Box / Kura wa alba
alwan (2004).
Saleh, Nadeem A. Emirati filmmaker. He
studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short film: Unsubscribe Me (with Hany
Madian, 2007, 1', Mini DV),
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Saleh, Omar. Jordanian filmmaker and member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative.
He studied at the Yarmouk University and
works as a telecom engineer. Short films: Decision Man (2005), The Last Patch (with Rifqi
Assaf, 2006, 15'), What a Job / Quel boulot
(with Mohamed Aboujarad and Hazim Bitar,
2006, 7', DV Cam), I Am Ready (2008, 12').
Saleh, Tewfiq.* Egyptian director of one
Syrian feature film, which won the top prize,
the Tanit dor, at the JCC in Tunis in 1972: The
Duped / Les dupes / al-Makhdhououn (1972,
100', 35mm). Also one Iraqi film: The Long
Days / Les longues journes / al-Ayyam altawla (1980, 100', 35mm).
Salem, Atef.* Egyptian director of three
Syrian feature films: Womens Tailor / Tailleur
pour les dames (1969, 35mm), The Beautiful
Shepherdess / La belle bergre (1972, 35mm),
My Wifes a Hippy / Ma femme Youppie / Zawjati min hippies(1973, 35mm).
Salem, Jamal. Emirati filmmaker. Short fictional film: People Are Their Values (2002, 17',
DV Cam).
Salem, Khalid. Emirati filmmaker. Short film:
Nightmare (2001, 15', Beta SP).
Salem, Mamdouh. Saudi filmmaker. Documentary: Full Moon Night (2007, 32').
Salem, Nada. Emirati filmmaker. She studied
at Dubai Womens College. Short documentary films: Pirates of Karama (2004, 8', Mini
DV), Adolescent Colors (with Wafa Faisal,
Maitha Ebrahim, Hana Abdullah Mohammed al-Mulla al-Muhairi, Heba al-Dhanhani,
2005, 28', DV Cam).
Salhab, Ghassan. Lebanese filmmaker.
Born in 1958 in Dakar, he grew up in Senegal
until his family moved to Lebanon in 1970. In
1975, he began his studies at the Academy of
Fine Arts in Beirut and in France and now divides his time between Paris and Beirut. He
has worked as an arts critic and made a num-
116
ber of short films, many of them experimental: The Key / La cl (1986), The Other / Lautre
(1989), After Death / Aprs la mort (1991, 21',
35mm), Phantom Africa / Afrique fantme
(1993, 21', 35mm), My Dead Body, My Living Body / Mon corps vivant, mon corps mort
(2000, 14', DV Cam), Nobodys Rose / La rose
de personne (2000, 8', video), Lost Narcissus /
Narcisse perdu (2004, 15', DV Cam), (Posthumous) / (Posthume) (2007, 28', DigiBeta). Feature films: Beirut Phantoms / Beyrouth, ville
fantme / Ashbah Beirut (1998, 105', 35mm),
Terra incognita / al-Ard al-majhoula (2002,
120', 35mm), The Last Man / Le dernier homme / Atlal (2006, 101', 35mm), 1958 (2009, 66')
(documentary).
Salibi, Maher. Syrian filmmaker. Short fictional video: The Rains Tale / Le conte de la
pluie (2005, 35', video).
Salih, Massoud Arif. Iraqi filmmaker.
Born in 1973 in Duhok in Kurdish Iraq, he
studied filmmaking at the Institut of Communication in Kurdistan. He acted in a dozen
plays for Iraqi stage and television. His co-directed first feature was produced by a Frenchbased company. Feature film: Narcissus Blossom / Le temps des narcisses / U nergiz biskvin
(with Hussein Hasan Ali, 2005, 80', 35mm).
Salloum, Jacqueline. Palestinian filmmaker. Born in Beit Jala, she is now based in
New York. Documentaries: Planet of the Arabs (2003, 9', Beta SP), Arabs a-Go-Go (2003),
Whos the Terrorist? / Min irhabi? (2003, 4',
video). Feature-length documentary: Slingshot
Hip Hop (2006, 89').
Salloum, Jayce. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1958 in Kelowna (Canada). Involved in cultural meetings in Europe and the United States.
Short films: Towards South Lebanon / Vers le
Sud-Liban (with Walid Raad, 1993, 49', video), This Is Not Beirut / Ce nest pas Beyrouth
(1994, 49', Beta SP), Untitled Part 1: Everything
and Nothing (2001 41', video), Untitled Part 2:
Beauty and the East (2002, 11' video), Untitled
Part 3B: (as if) Beauty Never Ends (2003, 11',

video).
Salloum, Pierre. Lebanese filmmaker. Documentary: 15 Millions and Counting (1999, 30',
video), Leilas Pictures / Les photos de Leila
(2002, 20', video).
Salman, Eyas. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
film: Noor (2008, 18').
Salman, Ibrahim. Iraqi filmmaker. He made
a Kurdish feature film in exile in Greece. Feature film: A Silent Traveller /Un voyageur silencieux (1992).
Salman, Saad. Iraqi documentary filmmaker. Born in 1950 in Baghdad, he studied at
the School of Fine Arts in Baghdad, graduating in 1969. He worked initially for Iraqi television and then moved to Paris, where he lives
and works as a film editor. He made a short
film: Once upon a Time There Was Beirut / Il
tait une fois Beyrouth (1984, 16', 16mm), and
a number of documentaries: Rimbaud, the
Moment of Flight / Rimbaud , lheure du fuite
(1990, 52', video), Tell Me About Shibam / Conte-moi Shibam (1992, 41', Beta SP). Featurelength documentaries: Because of Circumstances / En raison de circonstances (1982, 82',
16mm), Visa for Paradise / Visa pour paradis
(1996, 76', Beta SP), Questioning Where Reality
Begins and Ends, Baghdad On/Off (2002, 86',
Beta SP).
Salmeen, Saeed. Emirati filmaker. Short film:
Bint Mariem (2008, 25').
Salmy, Suzy. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
films: Palestine Is Waiting / La Palestine attend
(with Annemarie Jacir and Dahna Aburahme,
2003).
Salti, Ghassan. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. Short film: The 14th Parliament and Jordan First (2003).
Salti, Ihab. Palestinian filmmaker. Short film:
A Woman Like a Flower / Une femme comme
une fleur / Tilk al-mara al-warda (2001).
Samar, Salmane. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
film: I Love This (2001, 13', video).
Samara, Riham Mahmoud. Emirati filmmaker. Born in 1985 in Sharjah, of Palestinian
origin, she studied at the American University
of Sharjah. Short film: One Day with Alzheimer (2004, 4', Mini DV).
Samir. Iraqi filmmaker. Born in 1955 in
Baghdad of an Iraqi father and Swiss mother.
He has lived in Switzerland from the age of 6.
He made a number of documentaries: Semiology of a Homeland / Smiologie dune patrie
(1982), A Silent Film / Un film muet (1984),
Body Bent / Corps pench (1985), Cocoon / Cocon (1985), Glazer (1985), Morlov (1986), Martin Desler (1987, The Rogue / Le filou (1988),
Always and Forever / Toujours et ternellement
(1991), It Was Just a Job (1992). Feature-length
documentaries (both raising questions of
identity): Babylon II (1993, 91', 35mm), Forget
Baghdad: Jews and ArabsThe Iraqi Connection / Oublie Bagdad: Juifs et Arabesla connection irakienne (2002, 112', 35mm).
Samman, Rima. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1966 in Tripoli, she undertook paramedical studies in orthopaedics in Marseilles and
obtained a DEA in socio-linguistics in 1993.
She turned to cinema in 1995, working as
script-girl and production assistant. Trainee
on Bruno Dumonts Lhumanit. Short films:
Milk and Cream / Crme et crmaillre / Libna qishta (1999, 11', 35mm), Carla (2002, 19',
35mm), Yesterday Still / Hier encore (2006, 47',
35mm).
SANJAVI, ZAHAVI. Iraqi filmmaker. He
studied at the Moscow film school, VGIK.
Feature-length documentary: All My Mothers
/ Toutes mes mres / Hamey-e madrana-e man
(with Ebrahim Saeedi, 2009, 60').
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Sansour, Larissa. Palestinian filmmaker.
Born in Jerusalem in 1973, she lived in Beit
Jala for 15 years before studying in London,
New York, and Denmark, where she is now
based. She is also a writer. Short films: Bethlehem Bandolero (2004, 5'), Tank (2005), Happy Days (2006, 3'), Land Confiscation Order
06/24/T (2006, 11', video), Soup Over Bethlehem / Mloukhieh (2006, 10'), Sbara (2008, 9',
video), A Space Exodus (2008, 5', DigiBeta).
Sansour, Leila. Palestinian filmmaker.
Born in Bethlehem, she now lives in London,
working as a journalist and producer. Short
film: Global Coverage (2002, 6'). Featurelength documentary: Jeremy Hardy vs. the Israeli Army (2002, 75', Beta SP).
Sarkissian, Harry. Iraqi filmmaker
who has worked in Syria and Lebanon. Born
in 1924 in Baghdad, he studied drama at the
Fine Arts Institute in Baghdad and went to
study filmmaking at a Hungarian film school.
On completing his studies he began work for
Syrian television. He made his only feature
film, The Street of Dreams, in which he played
a leading role, in Lebanon. It is the only Lebanese feature to use the Armenian language.
Feature film: The Street of Dreams / La rue des
rves / Triq al-Ahlam (1973).
Sayegh, Layla. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
film: The Trunk / al-Sanduq (2004).
Seemba, Halima Saeed. Emirati filmmaker.
film: The Dream (2003, 3', Beta SP).
Seifeddine, Soubhi. Lebanese filmmaker. Feature films: The Resistance Fighter /
Le rsistant / al-Rajol al-samed (1975, 35mm),
Marriage of the Land / Les noces de la terre /
Urs al-ard (1978, 35mm), Al-Mouzayafa (1983,
35mm), A Country Above Wounds / Un pays,
les plaies, un dplacement / Watan fawq aljirah (1983, 35mm), The Fifth Column / La
cinquime colonne / al-Jiha al-khamisa (1984,
35mm).
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Selmane, Mohamed. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in 1925, he began his artistic career as a singer and dancer in Egypt and appeared in several films there. On his return to
Lebanon he turned to filmmaking, and unlike
most of his contemporaries he was able to
sustain his career as a filmmaker for a period
of 25 years. During this time, he made over
thirty commercial feature films, both musicals and melodramas, which achieved great
success throughout the Arab world. Two of his
later films were produced in Syria. Features:
The First Song / Le premier chant / al-Lahn alawal (1957, 35mm), Rendezvous with Hope /
Rendez-vous avec lespoir / Moad maa al-amal
1958, 35mm), The Songs of My Love / Les chants
de mon amour / Angham habibi (1959, 35mm),
Hello, Love / Bonjour lamour / Marhabane ayouhal hub (1962, 35mm), A Love Story / Histoire damour / Hikayat gharam (1963, 35mm),
Lebanon at Night / Le Liban, la nuit / Loubnan
fi leil 1963, 35mm), Praise for Love / Louange
pour lamour / Ya salam al-hub (1963, 35mm),
Joys of Youth / Joies de la jeunesse / Afrah alchabab (1964, 35mm), A Bedouin Girl in Paris /
Une bdouine Paris / Badawia fi Baris (1964,
35mm), The Idol of the Crowds / Lidole des
foules / Fatinat al-jamahir (1964, 35mm), The
Idol of the Desert / Lidole du dsert / Fatinat
al-sahra (1965, 35mm), In the Service of Love
/ Au service de lamour / Bi amr al-hub (1965,
35mm), A Bedouin Girl in Rome / Une bdouine Rome / Badawia fi Roma (1965, 35mm),
The Bank / La banque / al-Bank (1965, 35mm),
The Black Jaguar / La jaguar noire / al-Jaguar
es sawda (1965, 35mm), Youth and Beauty / La
jeunesse et la beaut / al-Siba wal jamal (1965,
35mm), Mawal / Mawal al-akdam al-zahabia
(1966, 35mm), The Wheedler / Lenjleuse / alDaloua (1966, 35mm), Chouchous Adventures
/ Les aventures de Chouchou / Moughamarat
Chouchou (1966, 35mm), Canticles of Love
/ Cantiques damour / Alhane al-hub (1967,
35mm), Welcome to Love / Bienvenue lamour
(1968, 35mm), Heroes and Women / Des hros
et des femmes / Abtal wa nissa (1969, 35mm),
Orchard of Love / Verger damour / Karm alhawa (1970, 35mm), Waves / Vagues / Amwage
(1970, 35mm), Bewilderment / Lgarement /
al-Dayae (1971, 35mm), Paris and Love / Paris

et lamour / Baris al-hub (1971, 35mm), Passion
on Fire / Passion en feu / Nar al-chawk (1971,
35mm), The Beautiful Girl and the Tiger / La
beaut et le tigre / al-Hassnawal nemr (1972,
35mm), Loves Guitar / La guitare de lamour
/ Guitare al-hub (1973, 35mm), Words of Love
/ Des mots de lamour / Kalam fi hub (with
Sayed Tantoui, 1973, 35mm), Battle in the
Desert / Combat dans le dsert (1974, 35mm)
in Syria, Professor Ayoub / Le professeur Ayoub
/ al-Oustaz Ayoub (1975, 35mm), The Horseman of Bani Abes / Le cavalier de Bani Abes
(1977, 35mm) in Syria, Who Puts Out the Fire?
/ Qui teint le feu? / Man youtfil al-nar (1982,
35mm).
Selo, Jalal. Emirati filmmaker. Short fictional
film: Malibu (2007, 4', Mini DV).
Sermini, Salah. Syrian filmmaker. Born in
1956 in Aleppo, he studied filmmaking at the
Universit de Paris III. Short films: In the Margin of Real Events and of Others Imagined / En
marge dvnements reals et dautres imagins (1981), Ode to Death / Ode la mort (1985,
35'), Memory and the Heart / La mmoire et le
cur / al-Zakira wal quab (1988, 13', 16mm),
Illusions on the Threshold of a Legendary City
/ Illusions au seuil dune ville lgendaire (1998,
24', video).
Sfair, Patrick. Lebanese filmmaker. Short animated film: Hijo de la luna (2004, 5').
Sfeir, Zeina. Lebanese filmmaker. Documentary: In Spite of the War / Pied au nez la
guerre (2001, 30').
Shaath, Ghalib. Palestinian filmmaker.
Born in 1935 in Jerusalem, he moved to Egypt,
where he studied architecture at the University of Alexandria. After teaching for several
years in Saudi Arabia, he decided to go to Europe to study filmmaking in Vienna. In 1967,
he returned to Egypt, where he worked for
television and made his only fictional feature
film. He has since worked as a journalist and
translator, settling in Beirut in 1974. Short
films: The Key / La clef / al-Muftb (1976, 25'),
Earth Day / La journe de la terre / Yawm alArd (1978, 40'), Olive Branch / Qusn al-Zaytun
(1978), Dont Drop the Green Leaf / Ne laisse
pas tomber la feuille verte / La toskiti-l-ghosnal-akhdar (1980). Feature film: Shadows on the
Other Bank / Des ombres sur lautre rive / Dill
al al-jnibi al-khar (in Egypt, 1973).
Shaban, Qasim. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentary: Nazareth 84 / al-Nasira 84 (1984).
Shabib, Sarah. Emirati filmmaker. Short film:
Yesterday Morning (2004, 3', Mini DV).
Shafee, Shamma. Emirati student. She studied at the American University of Sharjah.
Short film: Dont Fear (2003, 6', Mini DV).
Shahbandar, Nazih. Syrian pioneer filmmaker. Feature film: Light and Darkness / Lumire
et tnbre / Nouron wa thilal (1947).
Shahin, Khalifa. Bahraini filmmaker. Born in
1939, he studied filmmaking at Ealing Technical College in the United Kingdom during the
early 1960s and went on to direct a number of
short documentary films between 1967 and
1977, including Pictures of an Island / Images
dune le, People on the Horizon / Des gens
lhorizon, The Black Wave / La vague noire.
Shahin, Mohamed. Syrian filmmaker.
Began his artistic career in the theatre and
television. Prolific filmmaker for both the
state and the private sectors, with some twenty
short films and documentaries and over a dozen fictional features. Short films: Recollections
of Damascus / Mmoires de Damas / Dhikraytun min Dimashq (1965), Water and Life / Leau
et la vie / al-M wa al-hayt (1968), The Words
of a Dry Tree / Les paroles dun arbre sec (1969),
Baradd / Baradd (1969), Youth and Students
/ Jeunesse et les tudiants / al-Shabiba al-talaba
(1975). He contributed one of three episodes to
the first feature produced by the National Cinema Organisation: Men Under the Sun / Des
hommes sous le soleil / al-Sayyid al-taqaddumi
(with Nabil al-Maleh and Mohamed Muwad-
119
din, 1970, 108', 35mm). Feature films: A City
Rose / Une rose de la ville / Zahratun min almadina (1964, 35mm), Another Facet of Love /
Une autre facette de lamour / Wahj akhar lilhob (1972, 35mm), The Wounded Ballerina /
La ballerine blesse / Rqisa al al-firh (1973,
35mm), Cruel Woman / Femme cruelle (1973,
35mm), The Mameluke Jabers Adventure /
Laventure du Mamelouk Jaber / Mughamarat
al-Mamluk Jaber (1974, 105', 35mm), The Tents
of Qaraqoz / Les tentes de Quaraqoz / Khaymatu Quaraqoz (1974, 35mm), The Agitators /
Les fauteurs (1975, 35mm), Dont Say Goodbye
to a Day Thats Scarcely Gone / Ne dites pas
adieu un jour qui na gure pass / La taquli
wadan lil ams (1977, 35mm), The Jungle of
Wolves / Le jungle des loups / Ghbatu al-dib
(1977, 35mm), Farewell to the Past / Adieu au
pass (1978, 35mm), A Murder Step by Step
/ Un meutre pas pas / Qatlun . . . an tariq
al-tasalsul (1982, 35mm), The Game of Love
and Death / Le jeu de lamour et de la mort /
Lubatu al-hubb was al-gatl (1983, 35mm), The
Drama of a Girl from the East / Le drame dune
fille de lorient / Maasat fatt sharqiya (1983,
35mm), On a Rainy Day / Un jour pluvieux /
ash-Shams fi yaum ghaim (1985, 115', 35mm),
Cloud / Nuage / Sahb (1991, 35mm), Oh Sea /
Oh mer (1993, 120', 35mm), The Moneylender /
Lusurier / al-Marabi (1999, 35mm).
Shaker, Mounaf. Iraqi filmmaker. Studied at
the Independent Film and Television Academy in Baghdad. His second documentary was
made for Al Jazeera International. Short documentary films: Omer Is My Friend (2005, 15'),
Leaving (2007, 16').
Shamma, Suad. Emirati filmmaker. Studied
film: Angeldust (2007, 4', Mini DV).
Shamounki, Nadine. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short film: Effaced (2002).
Sharaf, Bashar. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. Studied business administration. Short
film: To Speed or Not To Speed (2003).
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Shargawi, Omar. Palestinian filmmaker.

Based in Denmark. Fictional feature film: Go
with Peace Jamil / Ma salama Jamil (2007, 90').
Sharidi, Nazim. Palestinian filmmaker.
Documentaries: Call of the Roots / Nida aljudhur (1984), The Dehaysha Ghetto / Ghtu alDehayshiyya (1988), Between the Dream and
the Memory / Ma bayn al-Hil wa al-dhakira
(1988), The Surrounded City / La ville entoure / al-Madina al-muhasira (1988), Fertile
Seasons / Des saisons fcondes / Mawasim alkhasab (1988).
Sharief, Ahmed Mohammed. Emirati filmmaker. Born in 1978 in Dubai, he studied economics at UAE University. Short experimental films: Sketches (2003, 5', DV Cam), Movie
(2004, 2', Mini DV).
Shawi, Burhan. Emirati filmmaker. Short fictional films: Once upon a Night (1999, 42', Beta
SP), Behind Closed Doors (2000, 12', Beta SP).
Shayya, Riyad. Syrian filmmaker. Born in
1951 at Souwayda, he studied filmmaking at
VGIK in Moscow and made one short before
completing his first feature. Feature film: AlLajat / Al-Leja (1995, 84', 35mm).
Shehada, Abdel Salam. Palestinian filmmaker. Now based in Ramallah. Documentary films: Palestinian Diaries (with Suheir
Ismal and Nazih Darwaza, 1992, 52', Beta SP),
Innocence / al-Biya (1994), Womens Human
Rights / Huquq al-mara al-ensaniyya (1995,
25'), Small Hands / al-Aidai al-saquira (1995,
26'), Close to Death / Bi al-qrab min al-mawt
(1997, 26'), Water, the True Challenge / al-Ma',
al-tahadi al-haqiqi (1998, 35'), The Cane / alOkkaz (2000, 26'), The Shadow / Lombre / alZill (2000, 43'), Stone by Stone / Hajjar bi hajjar
(2000), Mirage / al-Qasba (2000), Debris / Dcombres / Radm (2002, 19', Beta SP), Rainbow /
Qaws quzab (2005, 40'), Gaza, Another Kind of
Tears (2006, 53'), To My Father / Ila aby (2008,
52', DigiBeta). Also contributed one episode to
in Palestine / Une fois encore (cinq histoires sur

al-Yassir, Tawfik Abu Wael, Ismal Habash,
Najwa Najjar, 2002, 57', Beta SP).
Shmeit, Ghassan. Syrian filmmaker.
Born in 1956 in Quneitra, he studied at the
Higher Film Institute in Kiev, graduating in
1982. Documentary and short films: Bosra
(1983, 22'), Friendship Stopovers (1986, 20'),
Our Struggle in the Golan Heights a.k.a. Golan
Diaries / La lutte des ntres au Golan (1987,
32'), Together On the Road (1989, 20'), The
Buds (1990, 20'), Roses and Thorns (2003, 25'),
Glowing Beacons (2004, 40'), The Sun Castles
(2004, 20'). Feature films: Something Is Burning / Quelque chose brle / Shayma yahtariq
(1993), Black Flour / La farine noire / Tahin alAswad (2001, 120'), I.D. / Vos papiers (2007).
Shomali, Amer. Palestinian filmmaker. Contributed Checkmate (3' 06") to the collective
film Summer 2006, Palestine (2006, 35', Beta
SP).
Shoumali, Nabil Qusta. Jordanian filmmaker. Short fictional film: The Dress / La robe (5',
16mm).
Shuhaiber, Ramzy. Emirati filmmaker. Short
film: Sense of Detection (with Jaidaa Adel,
2007, 8', Mini DV).
Sikias, Tatania. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Mawawil (2002, 20'),
Sinnokrot, Nida. Palestinian filmmaker.
Based in the United States. Short film: Palestine Blues (2006).
Sirhan, Ibrahim Hassan. Palestinianborn filmmaker and pioneer of Jordanian
cinema. Born in 1916 in Palestine, he began
with a short documentary about a visit by
King Saud: The Visit of King Abd al-Aziz / Ziyara al-malak Abd al-Aziz (1935). He shot a
number of other films, including Dreams Realised / Ahlam tahaqqaqat (1939), Studio Palestine / Studio Filastin (1945), On the Night of
the Feast / Fi layla al-ayd (1946), Cinematic
Introduction / Ahmed Hilmi Basha / Ahmad
Hilmi Basha (1946), before being driven into
exile in what was then Trans-Jordan. There
he produced two fictional films of unspecified
length: The Moon and the Sun / La lune et le
soleil / al-Qamar wash-shams (1957) and The
Struggle in Jarash / Combat Djrash / Siraa fi
Jarash (1958), which are the founding films of
Jordanian cinema.
Siyyam, Ali. Jordanian filmmaker. Documentaries on Palestine: The Flower of Cities / La
fleur des cits / Zahrat al-madaen (1968, 10'),
Exodus 67 / al-Khourouj (1968, 17'), A Book for
You / Un livre pour toi / Kitab laka (1968, 10'),
The Burnt Land / La terre brle / al-Ardh almahrouka (1969, 12').
Skaff, Philippe. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Lesson No. 5 / La leon No. 5
(2007).
Skaff, Raghida. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Images (2000, 13').
Slim, Lokan. Lebanese filmmaker. Based
in Germany. Documentary: Massaker (with
Monika Borgmann and Hermann Theissen,
2005, 99', 35mm).
Smayra, Wissam. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Lebanese Non-footage / Non mtrage libanais (with Ghassan Kotait, 2003, 13',
16mm).
Solfan, Mohamed. Syrian filmmaker.
Feature film: Sabiha, Seductress of the Desert
/ Sabiha la sductrice du dsert (1975, 35mm).
Soliman, Marwa Mohammed. Emirati filmmaker. She studied law and design. Short animated films: Our POWs in Memory (with Mohammed Mohamed Soliman, 2004, 8', video),
Emirates Knight (with Mohammed Mohamed
Soliman, 2005, 10', DVD).
Soliman, Mohammed Mohammed. Emirati
filmmaker. Short animated films: Our POWs
121
in Memory (with Marwa Mohamed Soliman,
2004, 8', video), Emirates Knight (with Marwa
Mohamed Soliman, 2005, 10', DVD).
Sorrein, Cheirak. Iraqi filmmaker. Short fictional film about the Palestinian struggle: The
Game / Le jeu / al-Louba (1973).
Soufan, Hamaza. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. Short film: Anxious Skies (2005).
Souweid, Mohamed. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in 1959 in Beirut, he worked as
a film critic in the daily press from 1982 to
1994. His documentaries include: Absence
(1991), The Al-Fouad Cinema / Cinma alFouad (1993, 41', Umatic), I Am in the Camelia
/ Je suis dans le camlia (1994), The House / La
maison (1994), Hymn of Joy / Hymne de la joie
(1994), Qatr el nada (1994), South / Sud (1995,
37', Beta SP), Roses of Passion / Roses de passion (1996), Fate / Destine (1997, 13', video.
Feature films: Tango of Yearning / Tango du
dsir (1998, 70', 35mm), Until the End of the
Day a.k.a. Nightfall / Jusquau dclin du jour
(2000, 70', Beta SP) (documentary), Civil War
/ Guerre civile (2002), My Heart Beats Only
for Her / Mon cur ne bat que pour elle / Ma
hataftu li ghayriha (2009, 86').
Srour, Heiny. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1945 in Beirut, she studied sociology at
the American University in Beirut and then
completed a doctorate in social anthropology
at the Sorbonne. She worked as a journalist
in French, English, and Arabic in Paris and
London and as a teacher at the London International Film School and at Goldsmithss
College in London. Her first film, Bread of
Our Mountains (1968, 3', 16mm), about the
liberation struggle in Oman, was lost during the Lebanese Civil War. Short films and
documentaries: The Singing Sheikh (1991, 10',
video), The Eyes of the Heart / Les yeux du
cur (1998, 52', video), Women of Vietnam /
Femmes du Vietnam /Nisa Vietnam (1998,
52', video), Woman Global Strike 2000 (2000,
video). Feature films: The Hour of Liberation
122
Has Struck / Lheure de la libration a sonn /

Satu al-tahrr daqqat y istimmr (1974, 62',
16mm), Leila and the Wolves / Leila et les loups
/ Layla wa al-ziab (1984, 90', 16mm).
Srour, Shadi. Palestinian filmmaker.
Born in Nazareth, she studied in San Francisco and Tel Aviv. She has written, directed,
and acted in many plays. Short film: Either Me
... or Haifa / Ya ana ... ya Haifa (2007, 15', DV
Cam). Feature film: Sense of Need / Lpreuve
du besoin (2004, 90').
Stas, Khalil. Emirati filmmaker. Short documentaries: Sharjah, A Civilised Place to Think
and Work (2001, 21', DigiBeta), UAE: Growth,
Development and Prosperity (2001, 13', DigiBeta).
Stephan, Rania. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1960 in Beirut, she studied filmmaking at the
Universit de Vincennes and went on to work
in various technical roles in the United States
and Australia. She worked as assistant director
for the French documentarist, Simone Bitton.
Several short films: Ya layl ya ayn (1985, 10',
video), The Wonder of Manekine / Le miracle
de la Manekine (1986, 24', video), Murmur of
the Breeze / Le Souffle de la brise (1986, 5', video), Adonis (1991, 26', video), Phdre(s) (1993,
3', hi 8), The Tribe / La Tribu / al-Qabila (1992,
9', Beta SP), An Attempt at Jealousy / Tentative
de jalousie (1994, 4', Beta SP), Baal and Death
/ Baal et la mort / Bal walmawt (1996, 26',
Beta SP), Train, Trains / Train, trains, o est la
voie / Wayn essekeh? (1999, 33', Beta SP). Contributed Bint jbeil (2') and Monday, August 14,
Southern Suburb Bridge (4') to the collective
video).
Subaihi, Khalid Hasan. Emirati filmmaker.
He studied at the American University of
Sharjah. Short films: Searching for Subaira
(with Hasan Taryam Subaihi, 2004, 10', Mini
DV), Muweilleh: Unravelling Certain Truths
(2004, 13', Mini DV).
Subaihi, Taryam Hasan. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at the American University of

Sharjah. Short films: Searching for Subaira
(with Khalid Hasan Subaihi, 2004, 10', Mini
DV), My World, My Pitch (2004, 10', DV Cam).
Suleiman, Elia. Palestinian filmmaker.
Born in 1960 in Nazareth and raised under
Zionist occupation, he was driven into exile
at the age of 17, spending a year in London
and Paris. After a brief return to Nazareth, he
left for the United States in 1981 as an illegal
immigrant, where he was to live for the next
12 years. Documentaries: Introduction to the
End of an Argument / Introduction la fin de
lhistoire / Uqaddimah li-nihayat-jidal (with
the Canadian-Lebanese filmmaker Jayce Salloum, 1990, 45', video), War and Peace in Vesoul (with Israeli filmmaker Amos Gita, 1997,
70', 16mm), The Arab Dream / Le rve arabe
/ al-Hilm al-arabi (1998, 30', Beta SP), CyberPalestine (2000, 16', Beta SP). He also contributed one episode, Homage by Assassination /
Hommage par assassinat / Takrim bi al-qalt,
to the Tunisian-produced collective film After the Gulf? / La guerre du Golfe ... et aprs
/ Harbu al-khalj wa badu? (1992). Feature
films: Chronicle of a Disappearance / Chronique dune disparition / Sijil ikhtifa (1996,
88', 35mm), Divine Interventio / Intervention
divine / Yadun Ilahiyya (2002, 92', 35mm), The
Time That Remains / Le temps quil reste / alZaman al-baqi (2009, 105', 35mm).
Sultan, Abdulwahab. Kuwaiti filmmaker.
Born in 1940, he studied in the United States
and made a number of documentaries between 1963 and 1975.
Sulukdjian Arzoumanian, Arine. Lebanese
filmmaker. Born in 1972 in Beirut, she studied
at IESAV and worked as trainee in Bruxelles,
Paris and Beirut. She also worked as animator
for Lebanese television. Short fictional film:
The Pigeon / Le pigeon / al-Hamama (1994, 14',
Beta SP).
Sursock, Sabine. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1977 in Beirut, she graduated from IESAV
in Beirut in 2000 and went on to study script-
writing at ECAL in Lausanne, Switzerland.
She has worked in production and assistant
director roles in television, then as producer.
Now based in Paris. One short fictional film:
Who Has the Right? / A qui le droit (2000), and
two documentaries: The Prompter / Le souffleur
/ al-Mulaqqin (2000, co-dir., 26'), To Whom
It May Concern / A qui le droit / Ila man yaummuhu (2001, 17', Beta SP).
Syriani, Fadi. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
animated film: Animated Fate / Destin anim
(2001, 5').
Tabari, Ula. Palestinian filmmaker. Born
in 1970 in Nazareth, she has lived in Paris since
1998. During the 1990s, she was very active
in various government initiatives involving
education, theatre, and television. She is also a
stage and screen actress, appearing most notably in two films by Elia Suleiman, Chronicle of
a Disappearance and Arab Dream. Short film:
Diaspora (2005, 17', 35mm). Feature-length
video documentary: Personal Inquiry a.k.a.
Private Investigation / Enqute personnelle /
Alaqna wa khalaqna (2002, 90', Beta SP).
Tabet, Nadim. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
fictional film: Martine and Alia / Martiune et
Alia (2002, 27').
Tabet, Sylvio. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1970 in Beirut, he studied filmmaking at
ESRA in Paris. Short film: If the People One
Day ... / Si le peuple un jour ... (with Michle
Tyan, 25', Beta SP).
Taffal, Najah. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. She studied secondary education for the
deaf, and works as artist and instructor. Short
film: Najahs Puppets (2003).
Tahrer, Shaker T. Iraqi filmmaker. Born in
1959 in Sumer, he studied filmmaking at Gothenburg in Sweden, where he worked in the
audio-visual sector of a cultural center. Short
films: Atergang (1995), Min pappa grater inte
(2002), A Footballer at Midnight / Un joueur de
football minuit (2005).
123
Takash, Razan. Emirati filmmaker. Short
films: Discerning Memory (with Youssef Jassim Buhamas, 2006, 10, Mini DV), Kinetic
Energy Ad (2007, 1', DVD), Infinite (2007, 10',
DVD).
Takkouche, Ibrahim. Lebanese filmmaker. Feature films: The Deadly Necklace
/ Le collier meutrier / al-Akd al-katel (1960,
35mm), I Am Not Guilty / Je ne suis pas coupable / Lastou mouzniba (1960, 35mm).
Taleb, Dhafir. Iraqi filmmaker. Studied at the
Independent Film and Television Academy
in Baghdad. Short documentary film: Let the
Show Begin (2005, 15').
Tamari, Vladimir. Lebanese filmmaker. Documentary: Jerusalem / Jrusalem / al-Qods
(1968, 18').
Tamba, Hany. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1961 in Beirut, he studied graphics in the
United Kingdom (19771982) and became a
freelance designer in London. He also worked
on a number of commercials and animated
films. Short films: Beirut: This Citys Barbers /
Beyrouth: les barbiers de cette ville (1997, 14'),
Mabrouk Again (1999, 18', 35mm), The Hair
of the Beast / Du poil de la bte (2002), After
Shave (2004). Feature film: Melodrama Habibi
/ Une chanson dans la tte (2008, 94', 35mm).
Tan, Michle. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1971 in Beirut, he studied at ESRA in Paris.
Short film: If the People One Day ... / Si le peuple un jour ... (with Sylvio Tabet, 25', Beta SP).
Tanjour, Alfouz. Syrian filmmaker. Short
film: Little Sun (2008, 17').
Tantawi, Sayed.* Egyptian filmmaker
who made two Middle Eastern feature films,
the first in Lebanon, the second in Syria. Feature films: Words of Love / Des mots de lamour
/ Kalam fi hub (Lebanon, with Mohamed Selmane, 1973), Meeting of Strangers / Rencontre
des trangres (Syria, 1967, 35mm).
124
Tarazi, Gilles. Lebanese filmmaker. Documentary: Tomorrow at 6.30 / Demain 6h30

(2007, 23', video).
Thakur, Yusuf. Emirati filmmaker. Short

films: Endangered Dugongs (2001, 14', Beta SP),
Jewel of the Mangrove, 2001, 31', Beta SP).
Tariq, Sidra. Emirati filmmaker. Short film:

Grocery Shopping (2007, 9', DVD).
Tokhmafshan, Fatima. Emirati filmmaker.

Of Iranian origin, she studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short films: Miracle
(1998), Saeed in Name (2003, 46', Beta SP).
Tarzan, Hamzah Ahmed Fakhri. Saudi filmmaker. Short fictional films Living Backward
(2007, 16', DVD), The Basement (2008, 26',
Mini DV).
Tawfik, Mohamed. Iraqi filmmaker. His early films deal with Palestine. Short films: The
Path of Surrender / Masira al-esteslam (1981),
Umma Ali / Umm Ali (1983), The Child and
the Game / al-Tif wa al-laba (1985), The Guard
/ al-Natur (1988), Poet of the Reed / Le pote du
roseau (1999, 55', Beta SP), Tahaddiyat saai albarid (2002, 21', Beta SP), Maria (2006, documentary, 52', video).
Tawfik, Rania Mohammad. Iraqi filmmaker.
She studied film in Copenhagen, where she
currently lives. Short fictional films: Nawal
(2001), Khaled (2002), Home (2002), The Eternal Night / La nuit ternelle / Den Evige Nat
(with Katharina Raagaard, Lene Lavtsen, and
Marie Andersen, in Denmark, 2005, 8', video),
The Spotlight Chaser (in Denmark, 2004, 28',
DV Cam).
Tawil, Helga. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
films: Not Going There, Dont Belong Here
(2002, 25', video), Qalandia (2003), Isochronism: Twenty-Four Hours in Jabaa (2004).
Terawi, Ghada. Palestinian filmmaker. Born
in 1972 in Beirut to Palestinian militant parents, she was raised in Beirut, Tunis, and
Cairo and graduated from the American
University in Cairo in 1955. She has worked
in documentary since 1998. Short documentary films: Staying Alive / Nous voulons vivre /
Bidna naish (2001, 28', Beta SP), Whats Next?
/ Madha bad (2004, 40'). The Way Back Home
(2006, 33').
Tossounian, Aznive. Emirati filmmaker. She

has made one short documentary film: Souvenirs of the Past (2001, 15', DV Cam).
Toufic, Jalal. Lebanese filmmaker. Short film:
Saving Face / Sauver la face (203, 9').
Toukhy, Amr. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. He studied at the University of Jordan
and works producing commercials. Short film:
Give Me One Good Reason Not To (2003, 1', DV
Cam).
Turk, Fadi Yeni. Lebanese filmmaker. Teaches at St Joseph University. Short experimental
film: Demo ... (2003, 6', Mini DV).
Vahedipour, Annie. Emirati filmmaker. She
studied at the American University of Sharjah. Short fictional film: The Mouse (2004, 5',
Mini DV).
Votchinitch, Boshko* [also referred
to as Poko Pokovic]. Yugoslav filmmaker,
chosen by the Syrian government to train a
new generation of young filmmakers. Feature
film: The Lorry Driver / Le cammioneur / Saiq
ash-shahina (1966, 90', 35mm).
Waked, Antoine. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
film: The Big Fall (2005, 5', animation).
Wakim, Antone Wakim. Emirati filmmaker.
Short film: Rosy Dream (2002, 6', DV Cam).
Wakim, Bechara. Lebanese filmmaker.
Feature film: Holiday in Lebanon / Les vacances au Liban (1947, 35mm).
Wali, Abdl Jaber. Iraqi filmmaker. Feature films: Who Is Responsible? / Qui est responsable? / Man al-masoul? (1956, 35mm),
Naima (1962, 35mm).
Watfeh, Layal. Emirati filmmaker. Studied
at Dubai Polytechnic and currently works
in Dubai Media City. Short video advertisements: The HigheR ThE LoweR (2002, 2', DV
Cam), Flower (2003, 1', DigiBeta).
Yacoub, Fajr. Syrian filmmaker of Palestinian
origin. Born in 1963 in Damascus, he studied filmmaking in Sofia. Also translator and
critic. Short films: Solar Picture (2003, 17', Beta
SP), Labyrinth (2004, 3', Beta SP) Romeo and
Juliet (2005, 10', Beta SP), The Penguin / Le pingouin (2005, 18', 35mm).
Yahmed, Cheker Bin. Bahraini filmmaker.
Studied film in Morocco. Short fictional film:
One More Day (2007, 8', DV Cam).
Yaqubi, Mohanad. Palestinian filmmaker.
Short video films: Fix (2003), Around (2007,
3'), Rico in the Night (2007, 8'). Contributed
Trafic (2' 51") to the collective film Summer
Yassione, Dina. Lebanese filmmaker. Short
fictional films: Al-Aghair (2000, 12'), Demo
(2002, 8').
Yazbek, Elie. Lebanese filmmaker. Contributed Before, After (5') to the collective project
Videos Under Siege (DIFF 2008, 39', video).
Yaziji, Hadar. Syrian filmmaker. Documentary: Message of Love for Syria Message damour pour la Syrie (with Mahmoud
Chabaane, 1992, 38').
Yousef, Wadeih. Syrian filmmaker. Short
films and documentaries: The Euphrates /
LEuphrate / Hawdu al-furt (1970), The Beginning / Le commencement / al-Bidaya (1971),
The Great Dam on the Euphrates / La grande
barrire sur lEuphrate / Suddu al-furati al-adhm (1971), Popular Ball / Bal populaire / Raq-
125
sun shbi (1971), Busra / Busra (1972), The Resistence / La rsistance / al-Sumd (1973), The
Killers / Les tueurs / al-Qatala (1973), Greetings from Quneitra / Salutations de Quneitra /
Tahiyya min al-Qunaitra (1974), Violence / La
violence / al-Ightisb (1974), October Arrived
/ Octobre arriva / wa Jaa uktbar (1974, 20'),
The Road to Qasiun / La route pour Qasiun /
Al-tarq ila Qasiun (1978), Syria in the Moscow Olympics / La Syrie aux jeux olympiques
Moscou / Sriya fi Olimpiad Mosco (1983), The
Commandant of the March / Le commandant
de la marche / Qid al-masra (1984), The Birth
/ La naissance / al-Mild (1987). He also shot
one episode, Khero Alawaj, of the collective
film Shame / La honte / al-Ar (1974), alongside Bilal al-Sabouni and Bashir Safia. Feature
films: And October Is Coming / Et loctobre
vient / Wa ja tashrn (1973), The Trap / Le
pige / al-Masyada (1979, 100', 35mm), Altharwa al-samakia (1975), Smiling through the
Tears / Le sourire travers les larmes / Basima
bayna al-dum (1985), Vendetta of Love / Vendetta damour / al-Intiqam hubban (1985).
Youssef, Karkis. Iraqi filmmaker. Short fictional film on Palestine: Sad Oranges / Les oranges tristes / al-Burtugal el-hazin (1969).
Youssef, Mohamed. Emirati filmmaker. Born
in 1984 in Al-Ain of Egyptian descent, he
Short documentary film: Too Late Redemption
(2004, 9', Mini DV).
Youssef, Susan. Palestinian filmmaker. Based
in the United States. Documentary: Curfew
a.k.a. Forbidden to Wander / Couvre-feu /
Mamnu al-tajawwul (2003).
Zaatari, Akram. Lebanese filmmaker.
Born in 1966, he studied architecture at the
American University of Beirut. Directed several short documentaries for television, in
particular for Future Television in Beirut.
Short films include both documentaries: The
Candidate / Le candidat (1995), Present / Cadeau (1995, 4', Beta SP), and fictions: Distant
Shadows / Ombres lontaines (with Rachad al-
126
Jisr, 1993, 11', Beta SP), Countdown / Compte

rebours (1995, 6', Beta SP), Light / Lumire
(1995, 11', Beta SP), Family Portrait / Portrait
de famille (1995, 10', Beta SP), Teach Me / Apprends-moi (1996, 6' Beta SP), Alls Well on the
Border / Tout va bien la frontire (1997, 50',
video), Mad About You / Fou de toi (1987), Red
Chewing Gum / Chewing Gum Rouge (2000,
10', video), Him and Her / Elle + lui (2001, 32'),
Van Leo (2001), How Much I Love You / Que
je taime Shou bhebbakj (2001, 29', video), The
Hole / Le trou (2005, 30', Beta SP). He has also
created various video installations. Contributed two collaboratively made videos, Airport
1 (40") and Starry Night (45"), to the collective
video). Feature-length documentary: Today /
Aujourdhui (2003, 86', Beta SP).
Zaccak, Hady. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1974 in Beirut, he studied at IESAV in Beirut,
than at FEMIS in Paris. Author of Le cinma
libanais: Itinraire dun cinma vers linconnu
(19291996). Documentaries and fictional
shorts during and after his studies, including,
A Thousand and a Thousand Nights (1999, 15',
video), Lebanon through Its Cinema / Le Liban
travers le cinma (2003, 15'), Refugees for Life
(2006, 48').
Zadeh, Iman Tahsin. Emirati filmmaker. She
has worked extensively as a film editor. Short
film: Are You Still Here? (2006, 37', HD),
Zain, Ahmed. Emirati filmmaker. He studied at Abu Dhabi Mens College, Short films:
Mother (2003, 28', DV Cam), Marriage Fund
(2003, 14', Beta SP), The Return to the Village
(2003, 46', Beta SP), Bad End (2004, 10, DV
Cam), Ghost of the Road (2004, 7', DV Cam),
The Open Sea (2005, 25', Mini DV), Speed
(2005, 5' Mini DV), Manoros (2005, 7', Mini
DV), White Paper (2006, 18', Mini DV), Noor
(2006, 14', DigiBeta), The Flag That United
Us (2006, 9', Mini DV), Heartless / Bela qalb
(2007, 25', DV Cam), Sea Shells (2008, 16',
HDV), Al-Hamra Island in the Eyes of Emirati
Filmmakers (with Ahmed Arshi, 2009, 25', HD
Cam), Key (2009, 16', HD Cam).
Zakaria, Moustafa. Emirati filmmaker. He

Short films: The Red Button (2005, 10', Mini
DV), Its All in My Head (with Israa Magdi
Zayed, 2006, 3', Mini DV), Cairo Dubai Cairo
Dubai Cairo (2006, 29', Mini DV), Perceptions
of Time (2007, 1', HD), A Film for All and None
(2007, 10', Mini DV), The Beggar and Moustafas Brain (2008, 7', Mini DV).
Zakharia, Nasri. Palestinian filmmaker. Born
to Irish and Palestinian parents, he studied at
New York Universitys film school and lives in
New York. Short film: Tale of Three Mohameds
(2003).
Zaman, Hicham. Iraqi filmmaker. He is currently resident in Norway. Short fictional film:
Winterland (2007, 52').
Zantut, Fuad. Lebanese filmmaker. His work
concerns Palestine. Documentaries: On the
Path of the Palestinian Revolution / Sur le chemin de la rvolution palestinienne / Ala tarik
al-thaura al-filastinyyah (1971), Black Pages
/ Pages noires / Awraq sawda (1979), Treason
a.k.a. The Betrayal / Trahison / al-Khiyana
(1980).
Zaraket, Ali. Lebanese filmmaker. Short film:
Little MorningsBeirut (2008, 26').
Zayed, Israa Magdi. Emirati filmmaker. She
Short fictional films: Its All in My Head (with
Moustafa Zakaria, 2006, 3', Mini DV), 4.32pm
(2006, 9', Mini DV).
Zbib, Hassan. Lebanese filmmaker. Born in
1960 in Lebanon, he studied drama at the Faculty of Fine Art of the University of Beirut. He
has lived in France since 1987. Short fictional
film: How Can I Explain It to You, Mother? /
Comment texpliquer, mre? (1998, 18', 35mm).
Zhil, Maryanne. Lebanese filmmaker. Born
in 1969 in Beirut, she began as a journalist for
the Lebanese Broadcasting Company. In 1997,
she settled in Quebec and for 6 years worked
for French-language television. She made her
first short in 2004. French-language feature
film: From My Window, without a Home / De
ma fentre, sans maison (2006, 87', 35mm).
Zeidan, Samir. Iraqi filmmaker. Short fictional film: The Mute / La muette (1999, 25'.
35mm).
Zeine, Rawan. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. She studied at Emerson College in the
United States and works as a public relations
consultant. Short experimental film: Three
Eyes (with Hazim Bitar, 2007, 5').
Zeneddine, Chadi. Lebanese filmmaker.
Born in 1979 in Libreville, he had professional
training in filmmaking, video, and communication. He has worked in television, making dramas and documentaries, and directed
short films. Based in Paris. Feature film: Falling from Earth / Tomber de la terre / Wa-ala
el-ard el-samaa (2007, 70', 35mm).
Zikra, Samir. Syrian filmmaker. Born in
1945 in Beirut but raised in Aleppo, he graduated from VGIK, the Moscow film school, in
1983. He collaborated on the scripts of Nabil
al-Malehs Fragments of Images (1979) and
Mohamed Malass City Dreams (1983). Short
fictional and documentary films: Never Let Us
Forget / Nous noublierons jamais / Lan nansa
abadan (1974, 31'), The Witnesses / Les tmoins
/ al-Shuhd (1975, 32'), The Sea Is Our Front
Line / La mer est notre front / al-Bahr jabhatuna (1975), Women in Syria / La femme en Syrie
/ al-Maraa fi Sriya (1978), About Her / propos delle / Anb (1981 40'). Feature films: The
Half-Metre Incident / Laccident du demi-mtre
127
/ Hadithat al-nisf mitr (1983, 117', 35mm),
Chronicle of the Coming Year / Chronique de
lanne prochaine / Waqai alam al-muqbil
(1986, 120', 35mm), A Land for Strangers / La
terre des trangers / Turab al-ajaneb (1998,
120', 35mm), Public Relations / Relations publiques / Alaqat ammah (2005, 140', 35mm).
Zoabi, Manar. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
film: In Between (2005, 3').
Zoabi, Sameh. Palestinian filmmaker. Born
in 1975 in Iksal, near to Nazareth, he graduated in film and English literature at Tel Aviv
University in 1998. He subsequently received a
bursary enabling him to spend 3 years studying for a masters in directing at Columbia
University, New York. Short film: Be Quiet /
Reste tranquille (2004, 19', Beta SP).
Zoabi, Taher. Palestinian filmmaker. Short
film: Satisfaction / al-Rida (2004).
Zraiek, Hicham. Palestinian filmmaker. Documentary: Sons of Eilaboun (2008, 24').
Zureikat, Rabee. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. He studied at the NDU in Lebanon and
works as an advertising executive. Short films:
Ash (2006, 5', DV Cam), Not My Turn (with
Hazim Bitar, 2008, 6').
Zureikat, Sima. Jordanian filmmaker and
member of the Amman Filmmakers Cooperative. Studied in the United States and works as
writer and editor. Short films: A Couple and
a Silver Roof (with Muna Asmar, 2003), Dry
(2004).
Part Two
Feature-Film
Chronologies
iraq
Size: 169,235 square miles
Population: 28,945,657
GDP: 25,293m
GDP per head: 887
Capital city: Baghdad (population:
5,054,000)
Feature Films: 105
1940s
3
1950s
11
1960s
27
1970s
18
1980s
16
1990s
9
2000s
21
Iraqi Feature Filmmakers: 63
Faleh Abdel-Aziz, Layth Abdulamir, Kassim
Abid, Mohamed al-Ansari, Kamel al-Azzawi,
Dia al-Bayati, Mohamed al-Daradji, Zuhair al-Dijaili, Borhan al-Din Jassem, Hussein Hasan Ali, Jafar Ali, Safa Mohamed Ali,
Borhan Jassem al-Imam, Sami al-Jader, Fawzi
al-Janabi, Mohamed Youssef al-Janabi, Khairiya al-Mansour, Jawad al-Obali, Abdel Jabar
al-Obeidi, Kamel al-Obeidi, Hyder al-Omer,
Abdelhadi al-Rawi, Abdl Khaliq al-Samar,
Hussen al-Samara, Abdel Karem al-Saraj,
Amer Alwan, Mohamed al-Din al-Yasen, Mohamed Monir al-Yasen, Fayal al-Yassiri, Faleh
al-Zedi, Qays al-Zubaydi, Ravin Asaf, Khahil
Chawqi, Hayder Mousa Daffar, Abbas Fahdel,
Tahya Faq, Mohamed Munir Fanari, Youssuf
Gergis, Sahib Haddad, Karlo Hartyon, Ka
meran Hassani, Qassim Hawal, Ibrahim Jalal,
Mohamed Choukri Jamil, Shawkat Amin Korki, Hikmet Labib, Abdel Hadi Mobarak, Samir
Nimr, Maysoon Pachachi, Oday Rasheed, Jano

Rosebiani, Ebrahim Saeedi, William Saimon,
Hiner Saleem, Massoud Arif Salih, Ibrahim
Salman, Saad Salman, Samir, Zahavi Sanjavi,
Harry Sarkissian, Abdl Jaber Wali.
Other Arab Feature Filmmakers
Working in Iraq: 7
Salah Abou Seif, Fouad al-Tuhami, Ahmed
Badrakhan, Andr Chotin, Ahmed Kamel
Morsi, Niazi Mostafa, Tewfiq Saleh (marked
with an asterisk [*] in the chronology).
Chronology
1945
Cairo-Baghdad / Le Caire-Bagdad / AlKahira-Bagdad (Ahmed Badrakhan*)
(Egyptian co-production)
Son of the East / Le fils de lOrient / Ibn
al-Chark (Niazi Mostafa*) (Egyptian coproduction)
1948
Alia and Issa / Alia et Issa / Alya wa Issa
(Andr Chotin*)
1950
Fitna and Hassan / Fitna et Hassan / Fitna wa
Hassan (Hyder al-Omer)
Leila in Iraq / Layla en Irak / Layla fi al Irak
(Ahmed Kamel Morsi*) (Lebanese coproduction)
1955
Regrets / Nadam (Abdl Khaliq al-Samari)
1956
Warda (Tahya Faq)
Who Is Responsible? / Qui est responsable? /
Man al-masoul? (Abdl Jaber Wali)
1957
Sad Effendi (Kameran Hassani)
132
Tishwahen / Tiswahen (Hussen al-Samara)

1958
Doctor Hassan / Docteur Hassan / Doctor
Hassan (Mohamed Monir al-Yasen)
Lifes Lesson / La leon de la vie / Ababathu
al-hayat (Mohamed al-Ansari)
Take Pity on Me / Ayez piti de moi /
Irhamoini (Hyder al-Omer)
1959
The Will of the People / La volont du peuple /
Iradat al-chab (Borhan al-Din Jassem)
1960
I Am Iraq / Je suis lIrak / Ana al-Irak
(Mohamed al-Din al-Yasen)
1961
The Bride of the Euphrates / La marie de
lEuphrate / Aros al-forat (Abdel Hadi
Mobarak)
The Last Decision / La dernire dcision /
Hobat al-madlum (Safa Mohamed Ali)
1962
Abou Hella / Abu hila (Mohamed Choukri
Jamil and Youssuf Gergis)
Chazhra the Bedouin / Chazhra la bdouine
/ Chazhra al-badawia (Borhan Jassem alImam)
For the Homeland / Pour la patrie / Min ajl
al-watan (Fawzi al-Janabi)
Naima (Adbl Jaber Wali)
Nebuchadnezzar / Nabuchodonsor /
Nabuocher nosser (Kamel al-Azzawi)
Sultana (Safa Mohamed Ali)
Wedding Proposal / Projet de mariage /
Mashro zawadj (Kameran Hassani)
1963
Afra and Bader / Afra et Bader / Afra wa
Bader (Faleh al-Zedi)
Autumn Leaves / Feuilles dautomne / Awrak
al-kharif (Hikmet Labib)
Painful Nights / Les nuits de douleur / Layali
al-adab (Jawad al-Obali)
Return to the Countryside / Retour la campagne / Al-awda lil rif (Faleh Abdel-Aziz)
The Seven Oclock Train / Le train de sept heures / Qitar al-saa sabaa (Hikmet Labib)
1964
At Dawn / laube / Maa al-fajr (Abdel Jabar
al-Obeidi)
saa daach (William Saimon)
Room No. 7 / Chambre No. 7 / Gorfa raqm

sabaa (Kameran Hassani)
1965
The Hand of Fate / La main du destin / Yad
al-qadar (Kamel al-Obeidi)
1966
The Path of Love / La voie de lamour / Darb
al-Hubb (Borhan al-Din Jassem)
1967
Farewell Lebanon / Adieu Liban / Wadan ya
Lubnan (Hikmat Labib)
Gazala (Safa Mohamed Ali)
The Path of Evil / La voie du mal / Trik al-char
(Sami al-Jader)
1968
The Man / Lhomme / al-Rajul (Fayal alYassiri)
The Night Watchman / Le veilleur de nuit /
al-Haris (Khahil Chawqi)
1969
The Bus Driver / Le contrleur dautobus / alJabi (Jafar Ali)
The Good Omen / Le bon augure / Chaif Khir
(Mohamed Choukri Jamil)
1970
The Al-Ahrar Bridge / Le pont dal-Ahrar / Jisr
al-ahrar (Dia al-Bayati)
The Path of Darkness / La voie des tnbres /
Tariq al-dalam (Abdel Karem al-Saraj)
The Reward / La rcompense / Al-jaza
(Hussen al-Samara) (unreleased)
1972
The Thirsty Ones / Les assoiffs / al-Damiun
1973
Love and Karat / Lamour et karat / Hubb
wa karati (Fayal al-Yassiri)
1974
Hamidous Return / Le retour dHamidou /
Awdat Hamidu (Fayal al-Yassiri)
The Turning / Le tournant / al-Munataf
(Jafar Ali)
A Very Particular Love / Un amour tout
particulier / Gharmit khasa jidan (Fayal
al-Yassiri)
1975
Baghdad Nights / Les nuits de Bagdad / Layali
Bagdad (Borhan al-Din Jassem)
1976
The Head / La tte / al-Ras (Fayal al-Yasseri)
1977
The Attempt / Lessai / al-Tajruba (Fouad alTuhami*)
The Boat / La barque / al-Zawraq (collective)
The Houses in That Alley / Les maisons de
cette ruelle / Bitut fi dhalika al-zuqaq
(Qassim Hawal)
Lovers on the Road / Les amants en route /
Ushqal al-tariq (Fayal al-Yassiri)
The River / Le fleuve / al-Nahr (Fayal alYassiri)
1978
Another Day / Un autre jour / Yawm akhar
(Sahib Haddad)
The Searchers / Les chercheurs / al-Bahithun
(Mohamed Youssef al-Janabi)
1979
The Walls / Les murs a.k.a. Les remparts / alAswar (Mohamed Choukri Jamil)
1980
Hamad and Hammud / Hamad et Hammud /
Hamad wa Hammud (Ibrahim Jalal)
The Long Days / Les longues journes / alAyyam al-tawla (Tewfiq Saleh*)
The Sniper / Le canardeur / al-Qannes (Fayal
al-Yassiri)
1981
The Battle of Al-Qdissiya / La bataille dAlQdissiya / al-Qdissiya (Salah Abou Seif*)
Return to Haifa / Retour Haifa / Aid ila
Hayfa (Qassim Hawal)
1982
Mutawa and Bahia / Mutawa et Bahia /
Mutawa wa Bahia (Sahib Haddad and
Zuhair al-Dijaili)
The Princess and the River / La princesse et
le fleuve / al-Amira wal-Nahr (Fayal alYassiri) (animated feature)
1983
Clash of Loyalties a.k.a. The Big Question /
La grande question / al-Massala al-korba
1984
Palestine: A Peoples Record / La Palestine,
chronique dun peuple / Filstin, sjil sha
(Qays al-Zubaydi) (documentary)
1986
Borders in Flames / Frontires en flammes /
Hudud al-mulahihah (Sahib Haddad)
133
Flat No. 13 / Limmeuble No. 13 / Imara rakm
13 (Sahib Haddad)
Love in Baghdad / Lamour Bagdad / alHubb fi Baghdad (Abdelhadi al-Rawi)
The Lover / Lamant / al-Ashiq (Mohamed
Munir Fanari)
1988
20/20 Vision / Sitta ala sitta (Khairiya alMansour)
The House / La maison / al-Bayt (Abdelhadi
al-Rawi)
A Little Strength / un peu de force / Cha min
al-quwwah (Karlo Hartyon)
1990
Iftarid nafsaka Saidan (Abdelhardi al-Rawi)
1992
100 Percent / Miya ala miya (Khairiya alMansour)
The Bride from Kurdistan / La marie du
Kurdistan / Arusat Kurdistan (Jafar Ali)
Looking for Princess Leila / la recherche de
la princesse Layla / al-Baath ... an Layla
al-amiriyyah (Qassim Hawal)
A Silent Traveller / Un voyageur silencieux
(Ibrahim Salman).
1993
Babylon II (Samir)
1997
Long Live the Bride ... and the Liberation of
Kurdistan / Vive la marie ... et la libration
du Kurdistan (Hiner Saleem, 1997)
1999
Beyond Our Dreams / Passeurs de rve (Hiner
Saleem)
Iranian Journey / Une traverse en bus de
lIran (Maysoon Pachachi) (documentary)
2002
Baghdad On/Off (Saad Salman)
Forget Baghdad: Jews and ArabsThe
Iraqi Connection / Oublie Bagdad: Juifs et
Arabesla connection irakienne (Samir)
(documentary)
Jiyan (Jano Rosebiani)
2003
Bitter Water / Eau amre (Maysoon Pachachi)
Vodka Lemon / Vodka citron (Hiner Saleem)
Zaman, the Reed Man / Zaman, lhomme aux
roseaux (Amer Alwan) (documentary)
134
2004
pays des merveilles (Maysoon Pachachi)
(documentary)
Underexposure / Sous-exposition / Ghair salih
(Oday Rasheed)
2005
Dreams / Rves / Ahlaam (Mohamed alDaradji)
The Dreams of Sparrows / Rves de moineaux
(Hayder Mousa Daffar) (documentary)
Iraq: The Song of the Missing Men / Irak, le
chant des absents (Layth Abdulamir) (documentary)
Kilometer Zero / Kilomtre zro (Hiner
Saleem)
Narcissus Blossom / Le temps des narcisses /
U nergiz biskvin (Hussein Hasan Ali and
Massoud Arif Salih)
2006
Crossing the Dust / travers la poussire /
Parinawa la ghobar (Shawkat Amin Korki)
2007
Dawn of the World / Laube du monde (Abbas
Fahdel)
2008
Life After the Fall / La vie aprs la chute /
Hatay ma baad al-suqoot (Kassim Abid)
(documentary)
Our Feelings Took the Pictures: Open Shutters
Iraq / Nos sentiments ont pris les images
images de lIrak (Maysoon Pachachi) (documentary)
The Smell of Apples / Le parfum des pommes
(Ravin Asaf)
2009
All My Mothers / Toutes mes mres / Hamey-e
madrana-e man (Ebrahim Saeedi and
Zahavi Sanjavi)
Son of Babylon / Fils de Babylone / Ibn Babil
(Mohamed al-Daradji)
War, Love, God and Madness / Guerre, amour,
dieu, et folie (Mohamed al-Daradji) (documentary)
Short Filmmakers
(Fiction and Documentary): 36
Rtarek Abdelkrim, Layth Abdulamir, Kamel
Akaf, Baz Shamoun al-Bazi, Saeed Aldaheeri,
Hassanain al-Hani, Emad Ali, Kutaba al-
Janabi, Dhafir al-Khatib, Basheer al-Majid,

Saad al-Massoudi, Ibrahim al-Sahen, Hussein Alwan, Bahram al-Zuhairi, Jamal Amin,
Nizar Annadawi, Abbas Bani, Hiba Bassem,
Alias Chlatt, Yassine El Bakri, Victor Haddad,
Tariq Hashim, Cherif Abdel Hussein, Ahmed
Jabbar, Ahmed Kamal, Emmanuel Rassam,
Ammar Saad, Kifaya Saleh, Mounaf Shaker,
Cheirak Sorrein, Shaker T. Tahrer, Dhafir
Taleb, Mohamed Tawfik, Rania Mohamed
Tawfik, Karkis Yousef, Hicham Zaman, Samir
Zeidan.
Iraq: References
Al-Mafraji, Ahmed Fayadh. The Cinema

in Iraq. Baghdad: Research and Studies
Centre, General Establishment for Cinema
and Theatre, Ministry of Culture and
Information, n.d. [1978?].
Chebli, Hakki. The Cinema and Theater in
Iraq. In Arab Cinema and Culture, no. 3,
pp. 2834. Beirut: Arab Film and Television
Centre, 1964.
. History of the Iraqi Cinema. In The
Cinema in the Arab Countries, ed. Georges
Sadoul, pp. 117119. Beirut: Interarab
Centre for Cinema and Television, 1966.
Haustrate, Gaston. Irak: Mutation prometteuse du secteur cinma. Cinema 78 233
(1978): 6465.
Hawal, Kassem. Regard sur le cinma
irakien. In Septime Biennale des cinmas
arabes, pp. 99113. Paris: Institut du
Monde Arabe, 2004.
Hillhauer, Rebecca. Iraq. In Encyclopedia
of Arab Women Filmmakers, pp. 117129.
Cairo: American University in Cairo Press,
2005.
Ibrahim, Abbas Fadhil. Le cinma irakien:
un accouchement de quarante ans. In Les
cinmas arabes, ed. Mouny Berrah, Jacques
Lvy, and Claude-Michel Cluny, pp. 7683.
Paris: ditions du Cerf / Institut du Monde
Arabe / CinmAction 43, 1987.
. The Iraqi Cinema in 1964. In The
Cinema in the Arab Countries, ed. Georges
Sadoul, pp. 185186. Beirut: Interarab
Centre of Cinema and Television, 1966.
Kennedy-Day, Kiki. Cinema in Lebanon,
Syria, Iraq and Kuwait. In Companion
135
Encyclopedia of Middle Eastern and North

African Film, ed. Oliver Leaman, pp.
364419. London: Routledge, 2001.
Khamarou, Samir. Le cinma documentaire
en Irak de 1940 1980. In La semaine du
cinma arabe, pp. 5560. Paris: Institut du
Monde Arabe, 1987.
Mahajar, Jaffar. The Transformation of the
Act of Narration: Strategies of Adaptation
of Al-Qamar wal-Aswar. Alif: Journal of
Comparative Politics 28 (2008): 165187.
Nouri, Shakir. la recherche du cinma

irakien, 19451985. Paris: ditions
LHarmattan, 1986.
Thoraval, Yves. Irak: Des films ou une cinmatographie nationale? In Les crans du
croissant fertile, pp. 1530. Paris: Atlantica
/ Sguier, 2002.
Tsoffar, Ruth. Forget Baghdad: Jews and
ArabsThe Iraqi Connection. In The
Cinema of North Africa and the Middle
East, ed. Gnl Dnmetz-Colin, pp.
256265. London: Wallflower Press, 2007.
Jordan
1958
The Struggle in Jarash / Combat Djrash /
Siraa fi Jarash (Ibrahim Hassan Sirhan*)
1964
My Beloved Homeland / Ma patrie bien aime
/ Watani habibi (Mohamed Kaouach)
1969
The Road to Jerusalem / La route de Jrusalem
/ al-Tarikila al-Qods (Abdel Wahab alHindi)
Struggle till Liberation / Lutte jusqu la
libration / Kifah hatta al-Tahrir (Abdel
Wahab al-Hindi)
1991
An Oriental Story / Une histoire orientale /
Hikya sharqiyya (Najdat Ismal Anzur)
2007
Captain Abu Raed / Le capitaine Abu Raed
(Amin Matalqa)
Recycle / Recyclage / Eaadat khalk (Mahmoud
Massad) (documentary)
2009
Goodbye Gary / Adieu Gary (Nassim Am
rouche)
Not Quite the Taliban / Pas encore le Taliban
(Fadi Hindash) (documentary)

GDP: 7,201m
GDP per head: 1,300
Capital city: Amman (population:
1,060,000)
Feature Films: 10
1950s
2
1960s
3
1970s
1980s
1990s
1
2000s
4
Jordanian Feature Filmmakers: 7
Nassim Amrouche, Najdat Ismal Anzur, Abdel Wahab al-Hindi, Fadi Hindash, Mohamed
Kaouach, Mahmoud Massad, Amin Matalqa.
Other Arab Feature Filmmaker Working in
Jordan: 1
Ibrahim Hassan Sirhan (marked with an asterisk [*] in the chronology).
Chronology
Short Filmmakers
1957
The Moon and the Sun / La lune et le soleil
/ al-Qamar wash-shams (Ibrahim Hassan
Sirhan*)
Yahya Abdullah, Mohamed Aboujarad, Sajeda

Abousaif, Mustafa Abu Ali, Nabil Issa al-Khatib, Dalia Alkury, Firas Abd al-Jahil al-Moderat, Adnan al-Rahmy, Amjad al-Rasheed,
136
Adnan al-Roumi, Muna Asmar, Rifqi Assaf,

Muawia Attalah, Reem Bader, Hazim Bitar,
Ala Diab, Yazan Doughan, Merva Faddoul,
Razan Ghalayini, Fadi G. Haddad, Hussam
Hamarheh, Mais Hamarneh, Dima Hamdan,
Samir Hassan, Khaled Hlailaat, Ahmad Humeid, Hussein Jafarawi, Mutaz Jankot, Saleh
Kasem, Razan Khatib, Lina Khory, Amal
Khoury, Adnan Madanat, Sandra Madi, Aseel
Mansour, Said Najmi, Tariq Nasir, Aseel Qader, Ammar Quttaineh, Nesreen Rafeeq, Alabbas Saed, Jafar Safwan, Omar Saleh, Ghassan
Salti, Bashar Sharaf, Nabil Qusta Shoumali,
Ali Siyyam, Hamaza Soufan, Najah Taffal,
Amr Touky, Rawan Zeine, Rabee Zureikat,
Sima Zureikat. Plus the Amman Filmmakers
Cooperative.
Jordan: References
Lebanon
Charafeddine, Walid Charara, Jean-Claude

Codsi, Christine Dabague, Julio De Luca, Ziad
Doueiri, Sabine El Gemayel, Simon El Habre,
Joseph Fahdi, Josef Fars, Dalia Fathallah,
Assad Fouladkar, Gary Garabdian, Andr
Gedeon, Georges Ghayad, Christian Ghazi,
Joseph Ghorayeb, Samir Habchi, Zinardi
Habis, Joana Hadjithomas, Rafic Hajjar, Michel Haroun, Bahij Hojej, Katia Jarjoura,
Khalil Joreige, Fouad Joujou, Georges Kahi,
Michel Kammoun, Tahsine Kawadri, Fares
Khalil, Samir Khoury, Nadine Labaki, Romeo
Lahoud, Mounir Maasri, Jawad Metni, Wajdi Mouawad, Rida Myassar, Olga Nakkash,
Georges Nasser, Marc Abi Rached, Ghadi
Rahbani, Marwan Rahbani, Antoine Remy,
Jocelyne Saab, Ghassan Salhab, Soubhi Seifeddine, Mohamed Selmane, Mohamed Souweid,
Heiny Srour, Ibrahim Takkouche, Hany Tamba, Bechara Wakim, Akram Zaatari, Chadi
Zeneddine.

GDP: 11,604m
GDP per head: 2,861
Capital city: Beirut (population: 1,846,000)
Feature Films: 245
1930s
1
1940s
3
1950s
12
1960s
71
1970s
43
1980s
51
1990s
24
2000s
40
Lebanese Feature Filmmakers: 75
Taysir Abboud, Nicolas Abou Samah, Philippe
Akiki, Ali al-Ariss, Borhan Alawiyya, Samir
al-Ghoussayni, Wiam al-Saidi, Philippe
Aractingi, Danielle Arbid, Layla Assaf, Roger
Assaf, Maroun Bagdadi, Alfred Bahri, Nigol
Bezjian, Karam Boustany, Randa Chahal-Sabbagh, Georges Chamchoum, Jean Chamoun,
Hassib Chams, Fouad Charafeddine, Youssef
Costandi, Nicholas. The Cinema in Jordan.

In The Cinema in the Arab Countries,
ed. Georges Sadoul, pp. 182184. Beirut:
Interarab Centre of Cinema and Television,
1966.
Nicholas, Kostandi. The Cinema and Telev is
ion in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
In Arab Cinema and Culture, vol. 3, pp.
2225. Beirut: Arab Film and Television
Centre, 1964.
See also: Amman Filmmakers Cooperative
(AFC), http://JordanianFilms.com.
Jordan Short Film Festival (JSFF), http://
JordanFilmFestival.com.
Many of the short films are available on
YouTube/JordanianFilms.

Working in Lebanon: 12
Samir Abdallah, Farouk Agrama, Ahmed
al-Toukhi, Salah Badrakhan, Henri Barakat, Youssef Chahine, Youssef Issa, Youssef
Maalouf, Albert Naguib, Samir Nasri, Harry
Sarkassian, Sayed Tantawi, (marked with an
asterisk [*] in the chronology).
Chronology
1933
In the Ruins of Baalbeck / Dans les ruines de
Baalbeck / Bayn hayakel Baalbeck (Julio De
Luca and Karam Boustany)
1943
The Flower Seller / La vendeuse de fleurs /
Bayyaat al-ward (Ali al-Ariss, unfinished)
1946
The Planet of the Desert Princess / Kawkab,
princesse du dsert / Kawkab amirat assahra (Ali al-Ariss)
Summer in Lebanon / Lt au Liban (Salah
Badrakhan*)
1953
Remorse / Remords / Azab al-damir (Georges
Kahi)
1957
The First Song / Le premier chant / al-Lahn
al-awal (Mohamed Selmane)
Red Flowers / Fleurs rouges / Zouhour hamra
(Michel Haroun)
1958
For Whom the Sun Rises / Pour qui se lve
le soleil / Liman tachrok al-chams (Joseph
Fahdi)
Memories / Souvenirs / Zikrayat (Georges
Kahi)
Rendezvous with Hope / Rendez-vous avec
lespoir / Moad maa al-amal (Mohamed
Selmane)
Towards the Unknown / Vers linconnu / Ila
ayn (Georges Nasser)
1959
Days of My Life / Jours de ma vie / Ayyam min
omri (Georges Kahi)
The Judgement of Fate / Jugement du destin /
Hokm al-kadar (Joseph Ghorayeb)
The Rock of Love / Le rocher de lamour /
Sakhar al-hub (Rida Myassar)
The Songs of My Love / Les chants de mon
amour / Angham habibi (Mohamed
Selmane)
Two Hearts, One Body / Deux curs, un corps
(Georges Kahi)
137
1960
Birth of the Prophet / Naissance du prophte /
Mawled al-rassoul (Ahmed al-Toukhi*)
(Ahmed al-Toukhi*)
The Deadly Necklace / Le collier meutrier / alAkd al-katel (Ibrahim Takkouche)
I Am Not Guilty / Je ne suis pas coupable /
Lastou mouzniba (Ibrahim Takkouche)
1961
The Little Stranger / Le petit tranger (Georges
Nasser)
A Stranger in the House / Une trangre la
maison / Fil dar ghariba (Joseph Fahdi)
The White Poison / Le poison blanc / al-Sam
al-abiad (Georges Kahi)
1962
Abou Selim in the City / Abou Slim en ville
(Hassib Chams)
The Broken Wings / Les ailes brises / alAjniha al-mutakassira (Youssef Maalouf*)
The Devils Cart / La charrette du diable /
Arabat al-chaitane (Georges Kahi)
Hello, Love / Bonjour lamour / Marhabane
ayouhal hub (Mohamed Selmane)
Years / Des annes / Sinine (Georges Kahi)
1963
Abou Selim, Messenger of Love / Abou Slim
missaire damour (Youssef Maalouf*)
Chouchou and the Million / Chouchou et le
Million / Chouchou wal million (Antoine
Remy)
Darbat al-wade (Wiam al-Saidi)
Lebanon at Night / Le Liban, la nuit /
Loubnan fi leil (Mohamed Selmane)
A Love Story / Histoire damour / Hikayat
gharam (Mohamed Selmane)
Praise for Love / Louange pour lamour / Ya
salam al-hub (Mohamed Selmane)
Red on the Snow / Rouge sur neige / Dimaa
al-talj (Wiam al-Saidi)
The Vigilant Eye / Lil vigilant / al-Ayn alsahira (Gary Garabdian)
1964
A Bedouin Girl in Paris / Une bdouine Paris
/ Badawia fi Baris (Mohamed Selmane)
The Idol of the Crowds / Lidole des foules /
Fatinat al-jamahir (Mohamed Selmane)
Joys of Youth / Joies de la jeunesse / Afrah alchabab (Mohamed Selmane)
138

(Rida Myassar)
O Night / O nuit / Ya leil (Gary Garabdian)
The Pearl Necklace / Le collier de perles / Akd
al-loulou (Youssef Maalouf*)
You Are My Life / Toi, ma vie / Anta omri
(Georges Kahi)
1965
The Bank / La banque / al-Bank (Mohamed
Selmane)
A Bedouin Girl in Rome / Une bdouine
Rome / Badawia fi Roma (Mohamed
Selmane)
Bitter Honey / Le miel amer / al-Assal al-morr
(Rida Myassar)
The Black Jaguar / Le jaguar noir / al-Jaguar
al-sawda (Mohamed Selmane)
Body on Fire / Le corps en feu / Lahib al-jassad
(Rida Myassar)
Garo / Garo (Gary Garabdian)
The Idol of the Desert / Lidole du dsert /
Fatinat al-sahra (Mohamed Selmane)
In the Service of Love / Au service de lamour /
Bi amr al-hub (Mohamed Selmane)
Lika fi tadmor (Youssef Maalouf*)
The Millionnaire / Le millionaire (Youssef
Maalouf*)
The Seller of Rings / Le vendeur de bagues /
Biya al-khawatim (Youssef Chahine*)
Youth and Beauty / La jeunesse et la beaut /
al-Siba wal jamal (Mohamed Selmane)
1966
Abou Selim in Africa / Abou Slim en Afrique
/ Abou Slim fi Afriquia (Gary Garabdian)
The Arab Falcon / Le faucon des arabes / Sakr
al-arab (Rida Myassar)
Charbel (Nicolas Abou Samah)
Chouchous Adventures / Les aventures de
Chouchou / Moughamarat Chouchou
(Mohamed Selmane)
The Conquerors / Les conqurants / al-Kahiroun (Farouk Agrama*)
For Women Only / Pour femmes seulement /
Lil nisaa fakat (Antoine Remy)
Hotel of Dreams / Htel des rves / Foundok
al-ahlam (Albert Naguib*)
Love in Istanbul / Lamour Istamboul /
Gharam fi Istambul (Tahsine Kawadri)
Mawal / Mawal al-akdam al-zahabia

(Mohamed Selmane)
Sultana / Sultana (Riad Myassar)
The Tramps / Les vagabonds / al-Charidan
(Rida Myassar)
The Victory of the Vanquished / La victoire
du vaincu / Intissar al-mounhazem (Samir
Nasri)
The Wheedler / Lenjleuse / al-Daloua
(Mohamed Selmane)
Youth in the Sun / Jeunesse au soleil / Chabab
tahtal cham (Samir Nasi)
1967
Beirut 011 / Beyrouth 011 / Beyrouth sifr
hdaache (Antoine Remy)
Canticles of Love / Cantiques damour /
Alhane al-hub (Mohamed Selmane)
Do Not Touch My Wife / Ne touche pas ma
femme / Idak an mrati (Rida Myassar)
Golden Sands / Sables dor / Rimal min thaheb
(Youssef Chahine*)
The Freedom Fighters / Les fdayins / alFidaiyyoun (Christian Ghazi)
I Am Antar / Je suis Antar / Ana Antar
(Youssef Maalouf*)
The Mute Man and Love / Le muet et lamour /
al-Akhrass wal hub (Alfred Bahri)
The Realm of the Poor / Le royaume des pauvres / Mamlakat al-foukara (Philippe Akiki)
Safar Barlek / Safar Barlek (Henri Barakat*)
1968
The Likeable Thief / Le voleur sympathique /
al-Loss al-zarif (Youssef Issa*)
The Watchmans Daughter / La fille du gardien
/ Bint al-hares (Henri Barakat*)
Welcome to Love / Bienvenue lamour
(Mohamed Selmane)
1969
The Bells of Return / Les cloches du retour /
Ajrass al-awda (Taysir Abboud)
For You, Oh Palestine / Pour toi Palestine /
Fidaki ya Phalestine (Antoine Remy)
Heroes and Women / Des hros et des femmes
/ Abtal wa nissa (Mohamed Selmane)
The Madness of Adolescent Girls / La folie
des adolescentes / Jounoun al-mourahikat
(Taysir Abboud)
The Palestinian in Revolt / Le palestinien rvolt / al-Filastini al-thaer (Rida Myassar)
tous des fdayins / Koullouna fidaiyyoun
(Gary Garabdian)
1970
Orchard of Love / Verger damour / Karm alhawa (Mohamed Selmane)
Waves / Vagues / Amwage (Mohamed
Selmane)
1971
Bewilderment / Lgarement / al-Dayae
(Mohamed Selmane)
The Lady with the Dark Glasses / La dame
aux lunes noires / Saydat al-akmar as-sawda
(Samir Khoury)
Paris and Love / Paris et lamour / Baris alhub (Mohamed Selmane)
Passion on Fire / Passion en feu / Nar alchawk (Mohamed Selmane)
Salam baad al-mawt (Georges Chamchoum)
1972
The Beautiful Girl and the Tiger / La beaut
et le tigre / al-Hassnawal nemr (Mohamed
Selmane)
Fate / Le destin / al-Kadar (Mounir Maasri)
Girls to Love / Des filles aimer / Banat lil hob
(Rida Myassar)
The Gypsy in Love / La gitane amoureuse / alGhajaria al-achika (Rida Myassar)
A Hundred Faces for a Single Day / Cent visages pour un seul jour / Miat wajh li yom
wahed (Christian Ghazi)
The Queen of Love / La reine de lamour /
Malikat al-hob (Romeo Lahoud)
The She-Cats of Hamra Street / Les chattes de
la rue Hamra / Kotat char al-Hamra (Samir
al-Ghoussayni)
The Shrews / Chipies / Banat akker zamane
(Rida Myassar)
The Visitor / La visiteuse (Henri Barakat*)
Wolves Do Not Eat Raw Meat / Les loups ne
mangent pas la chair frache / Ziab la taakol
al-lahm (Samir Khoury)
1973
The Best Days of My Life / Les plus beaux jours
de ma vie (Henri Barakat*)
The Captive / La captive / al-Asira (Samir alGhoussayni)
Cherwale and Mini-Skirt / Cherwale et
mini-jupe / Cherwale wa mini-jupe (Samir
al-Ghoussayni)
139
Fire Woman / Femme de feu / Imraa min nar
(Rida Myassar)
Loves Guitar / La guitare de lamour / Guitare
al-hub (Mohamed Selmane)
My Darling / Ma chrie (Henri Barakat*)
The Path of Dreams / Chemin des rves / tariq
al-ahlam (Harry Sarkassian*)
The Postman / Le facteur / Saii al-barid
(Samir al-Ghoussayni)
Words of Love / Des mots de lamour / Kalam
fi hub (Mohamed Selmane, with Sayed
Tantawi*)
1974
The Beach of Love / La plage de lamour /
Chat al-hob (Antoine Remy)
Grand Prix / Grand prix / al-Jaiza al koubra
The Hour of Struggle Has Soundedthe
Struggle in Oman / Lheure de la libration
a sonn / Saat al-Tahrir dakkat ya Istimar
(Heiny Srour)
Valuable Game / Gibier de valeur / al-Istiyad
al-kabir (Rida Myassar)
Winter Women / Femmes dhiver / Nisaa lil
chitaa (Samir al-Ghoussayni)
1975
Beirut Oh Beirut / Beyrouth Beyrouth /
Beirut ya Beirut (Maroun Bagdadi)
Lebanon in Torment / Le Liban dans la
tourmente / Lubnn fi al-dawma (Jocelyne
Saab) (documentary)
Life Is a Melody / La vie est une mlodie / alDounya nagham (Samir al-Ghoussayni)
A Man Is Needed / On demande un homme /
al-Matloup rajol wahed (Georges Nasser)
Professor Ayoub / Le professeur Ayoub / alOustaz Ayoub (Mohamed Selmane)
The Resistance Fighter / Le rsistant / al-Rajol
al-samed (Soubhi Seifeddine)
1976
Does / Biches / Ghezlane (Samir al-Ghoussayni)
The Message a.k.a. Mohammad, Messenger
of God / Le message / al-Risalah (Mustapha
Akkad)
1977
Days in London / Des jours Londres / Ayyam
fi London (Samir al-Ghoussayni)
Fish Filet / Filet de poisson / Samak bila hassak (Samir al-Ghoussayni)
140
The Sahara Is Not for Sale / Le Sahara nest

pas vendre (Jocelyne Saab) (documentary)
1978
It Is Not Enough for God to Be with the Poor /
Il ne suffit pas que Dieu soit avec les pauvres
/ La yakfi an yakoun allah maal foukara
(Borhan Alawiyya) (documentary)
Marriage of the Land / Les noces de la terre /
Urs al-ard (Soubhi Seifeddine)
1980
At the End of Summer / la fin de lt /
Akher as saif (Marwan and Ghadi Rahbani)
A Beauty and Some Giants / Une belle et des
gants / Hassnaa wa amalika (Samir alGhoussayni)
The Shelter / Labri / al-Malja(Rafic Hajjar)
1981
Absence (Mohamed Souweid)
The Adventurers / Les aventuriers / alMoughamiron (Samir al-Ghoussayni)
Beirut, the Encounter / Beyrouth, la rencontre
/ Beyrouth, al-liqa (Borhan Alawaya)
The Decision / La dcision / al-Karar (Youssef
Charafeddine)
Forgive Me, My Love / Pardonne-moi mon
amour / Samehni habibi (Taysir Abboud)
The Island Devil / Le diable de lle / Chaitane
al-jazira (Samir al-Ghoussayni)
The Last Passage / Le dernier passage / alMamar al-akhir (Youssef Charafeddine)
1982
The Affair / Laffaire / al-Safaka (Samir alGhoussayni)
The Death Leap / Le saut de la mort / Kafzat
al-mawt (Youssef Charafeddine)
The Explosion / Lexplosion / al-Infijar (Rafic
Hajjar)
The Last Night / La dernire nuit / al-Layl alakhir (Youssef Charafeddine)
Lebanon in Spite of Everything / Le Liban,
malgr tout / Loubnan roghma kulla shai
(Andr Gedeon)
Little Wars / Petites guerres / Houroub saghira
(Maroun Bagdadi)
Mothers Suffering / La souffrance des mres /
Azab al-oumahat (Riad Myassar)
A Nightingale in Lebanon / Un rossignol
du Liban / Boulbol min Loubnan (Rida
Myassar)
lamour / Moad maa al-hub (Youssef

Charafeddine)
Who Puts out the Fire? / Qui teint le feu? /
Man youtfii al-nar (Mohamed Selmane)
Womens Intrigue / La manigance des femmes
/ Loubat al-nisaa (Samir al-Ghoussayni)
1983
Al-Mouzayafa (Soubhi Seifeddine)
A Country above Wounds / Un pays, les
plaies, un dplacement / Watan fawq al-jirah
(Soubhi Seifeddine)
The Heros Return / Le retour du hros / Awdat
al-batal (Samir al-Ghoussayni)
Kidnapped / Le kidnapp / al-Makhtouf
(Fouad Joujou)
Mr. Risk-Everything / Monsieur risque-tout /
al-Moujazef (Youssef Charafeddine)
Our Little Kings / Nos petits rois / Mulkund
al-sighar (Andr Gedeon)
A Woman with a Monster / Une femme chez
un monstre / Imraa fi bayt imlak (Zinardi
Habis)
1984
Amani Under the Rainbow / Amani sous larc
en ciel (Samir Khoury)
The Fifth Column / La cinquime colonne / alJiha al-khamisa (Soubhi Seifeddine)
Fragile Houses / Maisons fragiles / Bouyout
min warak (Rafic Hajjar)
The Ghost from the Past / Le fantme du pass
/ Chabah almadi (Georges Ghayad)
Leila and the Wolves / Layla et les loups /
Layla wa al-ziab (Heiny Srour)
Maaraka / Maarak (Roger Assaf)
My Eternal Love / Mon amour ternel / Hopubi lazi la yamout (Youssef
Charafeddine)
The Siren / La sirne / Arouss al-bahr (Samir
al-Ghoussayni)
The South in Revolt / Le sud rvolt / alJanoub al-thaer (Rida Myassar)
1985
Al-Marmoura (Wiam al-Saidi)
The Gipsy and the Heroes / La gitane et les
hros / al-Ghajaria wal abtal (Samir alGhoussayni)
The Seductress and the Adventurer / La
sductrice et laventurier / al-Fatina wal
moughamer (Samir al-Ghoussayni)
A Suspended Life a.k.a. Teenage Flirtation /
Une vie suspendue a.k.a. Ladolescente, sucre
damour / Ghazal al-bant 2 (Jocelyne Saab)
The Vision / La vision / al-Rouya (Youssef
Charafeddine)
1986
At the Mercy of the Winds / Au gr des vents /
Fi mahab al-rih (Zinardi Habis)
Ayyam al-loulou (Wiam al-Saidi)
Me, the Radar / Moi, le radar / Ana al-radar
(Wiam al-Saidi)
The Session Is Over / La sance est leve / Wa
roufiat al-Jalsa (Georges Ghayad)
1987
Shame, Restoum / La honte, Restoum / Ayb ya
Restoum (Wiam al-Saidi)
The Veiled Man / Lhomme voil / al-Rajul almuhajjah (Maroun Bagdadi)
1989
Fadous and the Hitchhiker / Fadous et
lautostoppeuse (Samir al-Ghoussayni)
1990
Outside Life / Hors la vie / Kharif al-hayat
(Maroun Bagdadi)
1991
The Cry / Le cri / al-Sarkha (Fouad
Charafeddine)
For Whoever Sings of Love / Pour qui chante
lamour / Liman youghanni al-hub (Wiam
al-Saidi)
Screens of Sand / crans de sable (Randa
Chahal-Sabbag)
Uncle Vania and Co.s Circus / Le cirque de
loncle Vania et cie / Cirque al-ame Vania wa
chourakah (Samir al-Ghoussayni)
The Woman Thief / La voleuse / al-Sarika
(Youssef Charafeddine)
1992
The Girl from the Air / La fille de lair
(Maroun Bagdadi)
The Tornado / Le tourbillon / al-Issar (Samir
Habchi)
1993
Mr. Gold / Monsieur Gold / Mr. Gold (Samir
al-Ghoussayni)
1994
The Freedom Gang / Le gang de la libert / alSheikha (Layla Assaf)
Karim Abou Chacra Does His Military
Service / Karim Abou Chacra fait son service
141
militaire / Karim Abdou Chacra fi khidmat
al-alam (Fouad Joujou)
Lebanon: Bits and Pieces / Le Liban, fait de
pices et de morceaux / Lubnan qita, qita
(Olga Nakkash)
Once upon a Time, Beirut a.k.a. The Story of
a Star / Il tait une fois Beyrouth, histoire
dune star / Kan ya ma kan Beirut a.k.a.
Qissah najmah (Jocelyne Saab)
Operation: Golden Phoenix / Opration:
golden phnix / Amaliat al-taer al-zahabi
The Story of a Return a.k.a. A Time Has Come
/ Histoire dun retour a.k.a. Il est temps / Ana
al-awan (Jean-Claude Codsi)
1995
Our Heedless Wars / Nos guerres imprudents /
Hurubina al-taisha (Randa Chahal-Sabbag)
1997
The Infidels / Les infidles (Randa ChahalSabbag)
Zeinab and the River / Zeinab et le fleuve /
Zaynab wa-l-nahr (Christine Dabague)
1998
Beirut Phantoms / Beyrouth, ville fantme /
Ashbah Beirut (Ghassan Salhab)
Tango of Yearning / Tango du dsir (Mohmed
Souweid)
We Shall Return One Day / Nous retour
nerons un jour (Samir Abdallah and Walid
Charara) (documentary)
West Beyrouth / Beirut al-gharbiya (Ziad
Doueiri)
1999
rose / Al-bayt al-zahr (Joana Hadjithomas
and Khalil Joreige)
The Civilised / Civilises / al-Mutahadirat
(Randa Chahal-Sabbag)
2000
Jalla! Jalla! (Josef Fars)
The Shadows of the City / Lombre de la ville /
Taif al-madina (Jean Chamoun)
Until the End of the Day a.k.a. Nightfall /
Jusquau dclin du jour (Mohamed Souweid)
(documentary)
2001
Meshwar (Samir Habchi)
When Maryam Spoke Out / Quand Maryam
sest dvoile / Lamma hikt Maryam (Assad
Fouladkar)
142
2002
Civil War / Guerre civile (Mohamed Souweid)
Terra incognita / al-Ardh al-majhoulah
(Ghassan Salhab)
2003
Belt of Fire / Ceinture de feu / Zinnar al-nar
(Bahij Hojej)
The Cops / Les flics (Josef Fars)
The Kite / Le cerf-volant / Yayyara min waraq
(Randa Chahal-Sabbag)
The Lady of the Palace / La dame du palais /
Sayidat el-kasr (Samir Habashi) (documentary)
Muron (Nigol Bezjian) (documentary)
Today / Aujourdhui (Akram Zaatari) (documentary)
2004
Beirut between New York and Baghdad /
Beyrouth entre New York et Bagdad (Dalia
Fathallah) (documentary)
In the Battlefields / Dans les champs de bataille / Maarik hob (Danielle Arbid)
Lila Says That / Lila dit a (Ziad Doueiri)
Littoral (Wajdi Mouawad)
2005
Ayroum (Nigol Bezjian) (documentary)
The Bus / Lautobus / Bosta (Philippe
Aractingi)
Dunia (Jocelyne Saab)
A Perfect Day / Un jour parfait / Yawm akhar
(Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige)
Zozo (Josef Fars)
2006
Falafel (Michel Kammoun)
The Last Man / Le dernier homme / Atlal
(Ghassan Salhab)
Terminator (Katia Jarjoura)
2007
Caramel (Nadine Labaki)
Falling from Earth / Tomber de la terre / Waala el-ard el-samaa (Chadi Zeneddine)
I Want to See / Je veux voir (Joan Hadjithomas
and Khalil Joreige)
Khalass (Borhan Alawiya)
A Lost Man / Un homme perdu (Danielle
Arbid)
Under the Bombs / Sous les bombes / Taht elqasef (Philippe Aractingi)
2008
After the War ... / Aprs la guerre cest tou
jours la guerre (Samir Abdallah*) (documentary)
Beirut Open City / Beyrouth ville ouverte
(Samir Habchi)
Melodrama Habibi / Une chanson dans la tte
(Hany Tamba)
Niloofar (Sabine El Gemayel)
The One-Man Village / Le village dun seul
homme / Samaan bildayaa (Simon El Habre)
(documentary)
2009
1958 (Ghassan Salhab) (documentary)
Help / Au secours (Marc Abi Rached)
My Heart Beats Only for Her / Mon cur ne
bat que pour elle / Ma hataftu li ghayriha
(Mohamed Souweid)
Remnants of a War / Les restes dune guerre
(Jawad Metni) (documentary)
Short Filmmakers
Anne-Marie Abboud, Serena Abi Aad, Jad Abi
Khalil, Maher Abi Samra, Hady Abi Wardeh,
Zeina Aboulhosn, Amani Abu Alwan, Lamia
Abu Haidar, Ajram Ajram, Myrna Akaron,
Rana Alamuddin, Fouad Alaywan, Rachad
al-Jisr, Dima al-Joundi, Jihan al-Tahri, Chadi
Aoun, Rania Attieh, Ruba Attieyeh, Abdel
Raheem Awjeh, Ray Barakat, Sheila Barakat,
Raymond Bassile, Tina Baz, Sofiane Belaid,
Hicham Bizri, Vatche Boulghourjian, Lucien
Bourjeily, Bass Brche, Gregory Buchakjian,
Carlos Chahine, Elias Chahine, Andr Chammas, Wissam Charaf, Jihane Chouaib, Cynthia Choucair, Ely Dagher, Jacques Debs, Wael
Deed, Hagop Der-Ghougassian, Rolly Dib,
Amin Dora, De Gaulle Eid, Rana Eid, Rouba
El Asmar, Sabine El Chamaa, Dima El Horr,
Nadyne El Khoury, Tania El Khoury, Fouad El
Koury, Maounan El Rahabani, Nasser Fakih,
Dalia Fathallah, Zeina Fathallah, Bassem Fayad, Daniel Garda, Jean Gebran, Lina Ghaibeh,
Amer Ghandour, Samer Ghorayeb, Nadine
Ghorra, Ahmad Ghsein, Samira Gloor-Fadel,
Mirella Habr, Maha Haddad, Merdad Hage,
Sara Hadar, Moutia Halabi, Khalil Hanoun,
Amal Harb, Mounir Haydamous, Mahmoud Hojeij, Georges Homsey, Laila Hotait,
Nadia Hotait, Lamia Joreige, Sayed Kaado,
Leila Kanaan, Tarek Kandil, Raf Karam,
Fadi Kassem, Dimitri Khadr, Elie Khalif,
Elda Khanamirian, Yasmine Khlat, Talal
Khoury, Rami Kodeih, Ghassan Kotait, Carmen Labaki, Sarmad Louis, Myrna Maakaron,
Jacques Madvo, Carol Mansour, Reine Mitri,
Samar Mogharbei, Pierre Mouarkech, Rabih
Mroue, Tina Naccache, Walid Nahas, Oscar
Naim, Carine Nicholas, Rym Noujam, Wael
Noureddine, Maria Ousseimi, Antoine Partamian, Jordano Pidutti, Walid Raad, Tahani
Rached, Roula Ragheb, Eliane Raheb, Memem
Richa, Daniele Salaris, Katia Saleh, Jayce Salloum, Pierre Salloum, Samar Salmane, Rima
Samman, Patrick Sfeir, Zeina Sfeir, Tatania
Sikias, Philippe Skaff, Raghida Skaff, Lokman Slim, Wissam Smayra, Rania Stephan,
Arine Arzoumanian Sulukdjian, Sabine Sursock, Fadi Syriani, Nadim Tabet, Sylvio Tabet,
Vladimir Tamari, Michle Tan, Gilles Tarazi,
Jalal Toufic, Fadi Yeni Turk, Antoine Waked,
Dina Yassione, Helie Yazbek, Hady Zaccak, Fuad Zantut, Ali Zaraket, Hassan Zbib,
Maryanne Zhil.
Lebanon: References
Al-Ariss, Ibrahim. An Attempt at Reading

the History of Cinema in Lebanon: From
Cinema to Society and Vice Versa. In Il
cinema dei paesi arabi, Quarta edizione / Arab Film Festival, 4th ed., pp.
3470. Naples: Fondazione Labatorio
Mediterraneo, 1997.
. Hommage Maroun Bagdadi. In
Deuxime Biennale des cinmas arabes, pp.
181198. Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe,
1994.
Alawaya, Borhan. Interview with Anna
Albertano. In Il cinema dei paesi arabi,
Quarta edizione / Arab Film Festival,
4th ed., pp. 8897. Naples: Fondazione
Labatorio Mediterraneo, 1997.
. Sculpteur du temps (interview).
In Cinma et Mditerrane (Actes du 11e
Festival International de Montpellier),
143
pp. 203214. Montpellier: Festival de
Montpellier / Climat, 1989.
Assaf, Roger. Les images irrationelles
(interview with Djamal Boukella and
Huber Corbin). In Actes des 9e rencontres, pp. 117123. Montpellier: Festival de
Montpellier, 1987.
Bagdadi, Maroun. Hors la vie (script). Paris:
LAvant-scne Cinma, 1994.
. Lternelle jeunesse du cinema (interview with Thierry Lenouvel and Henri
Talvat). In Actes des 15e rencontres, pp. 37.
Montpellier: Festival de Montpellier, 1993.
Behna, Marie-Claude. Gros plan sur le
nouveau cinma libanais. In Troisime festival des cinmas arabes, pp. 6075. Paris:
Institut du Monde Arabe, 1996.
Chamoun, Jean, and Ma Masri. Contre la
guerre-spectacle (interview with Hubert
Corbin and Michle Driguez). In Actes
des 10e rencontres, pp. 9197. Montpellier:
Festival de Montpellier, 1998.
Chmayt, Waid. Images de la guerre du
Liban. In Les cinmas arabes, ed. Mouny
Berrah, Jacques Lvy, and Claude-Michel
Cluny, pp. 8489. Paris: ditions du Cerf /
Institut du Monde Arabe CinmAction 43,
1987.
Deeley, Mona. Beyrouth al-Gharbiyya / West
Beirut. In The Cinema of North Africa and
the Middle East, ed. Gnl Dnmetz-Colin,
pp. 190198. London: Wallflower Press,
2007.
Hillhauer, Rebecca. Lebanon. In Encyclo
pedia of Arab Women Filmmakers, pp.
130195. Cairo: American University Press
in Cairo, 2005.
Jabre, Farid. The Industry in the Lebanon.
Interarab Center for Cinema and
Television, 1966.
Khatib, Lina. Kan ya ma kan Beirut / Once
upon a Time in Beirut. In The Cinema
144
of North Africa and the Middle East, ed.

Gnl Dnmetz-Colin, pp. 156166.
London: Wallflower Press, 2007.
. Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil
War and Beyond. London: I. B. Tauris,
2008.
Khoury, Lucienne. History of the Lebanese
Cinema. In The Cinema in the Arab
Countries, ed. Georges Sadoul, pp. 120124.
Beirut: Interarab Center for Cinema and
Television, 1966.
Mohammad, Oussama. Interview with Henri
Talvat. In Actes des 10e rencontres, pp. 98
100. Montpellier: Festival de Montpellier,
1998.
Srour, Heiny. Femme, Arabe ... et Cinaste.
CinemArabe 45 (1976): 3442.
Thoraval, Yves. Liban de la dolce vita la

maturit. In Les crans du croissant fertile,
pp. 3158. Paris: Atlantica / Sguier, 2002.
Wazen, Abdo. War as Subject for Cinema.
Arab Cinematics: Towards the New and the
Alternative, ed. Ferial J Ghazoul (1995):
229234.
Westmoreland, Mark. Cinematic Dreaming:
On Phantom Poetics and the Longing for a
Lebanese National Cinema. Text, Practice,
Performance 4 (2002): 3350.
Zaccak, Hady. Le cinma libanais: itinraire
dun cinma vers linconnu (19291996).
Beirut: Dar el-Machreq, 1997.
Palestine

Working in Palestine: 2
Size: 2,324 square miles (Israel: 8,522

square miles)
Population: 3,761,646 (Israel: 7,243,600)
GDP: 2,769m (Israel: 71,729m)
GDP per head: 660 (Israel: 10,176)
Capital city: Jerusalem (not fully recognized) (population: 733,300)
Miguel Littin, Samir Nimr (marked with an

asterisk [*] in the chronology).
Feature Films: 50
1970s
3
1980s
5
1990s
10
2000s
32
Palestinian Feature Filmmakers: 25
Samir Abdallah, Hany Abu Assad, Tawfik
Abu Wael, Kamal al-Jafari, Osama al-Zain,
Mohamed Bakri, Cherien Dabis, Hanna Elias,
Nasri Hajjaj, Nizar Hassan, Annemarie Jacir,
Michel Khleifi, Rashid Masharawi, Ma Masri,
Juliano Mer-Khamis, Najwa Najjar, Ali Nassar, Shirin Salameh, Jacqueline Salloum, Leila
Sansour, Ghalib Shaath, Omar Shargawi,
Shadi Srour, Elia Suleiman, Ula Tabari.
Chronology
1976
Victory in His Eyes / La victoire dans ses yeux
/ Al nasr fi unynihim (Samir Nimr*)
1977
The Children of Palestine / Les enfants de
Palestine / Affl Filasyn (Samir Nimr*)
The War in Lebanon / La guerre au Liban /
Harb Lubnn (Samir Nimr*)
1980
Fertile Memory / La mmoire fertile / Aldhkira al-khisba (Michel Khleifi)
1984
Roots / Racines / al-Judhur (Samir Nimr*)
1987
Wedding in Galilee / Noce en Galile / Urs aljalil (Michel Khleifi)
1988
Palestine on Fire / La Palestine en feu /
Filastin fi al-lahb (Samir Nimr*)
1989
Canticle of Stones / Cantique de pierre /
Nashid al-hajjar (Michel Khleifi)
1993
Curfew / Couvre-feu / Hatta isaar akhar
(Rashid Masharawi)
Order of the Day / Lordre du jour (Michel
Khleifi)
The Wet Nurse / La nourrice / al-Mardaa (Ali
Nassar)
1996
Chronicle of a Disappearance / Chronique
dune disparition / Sijil ikhtifa (Elia
Suleiman)
Haifa / Hafa / Haifa (Rashid Masharawi)
Jasmine / Yasmin (Nizar Hassan)
The Milky Way / La voie lacte / Darb altahanat (Ali Nassar)
The Tale of the Three Jewels / Conte des trois
diamants / Hikayat al-jawaher al-thalatha
(Michel Khleifi)
1998
(Nizar Hassan)
2000
Cut / Coupure (Nizar Hassan)
A Wedding in Ramallah / Farah fi Ramallah
(Shirin Salameh) (documentary)
2001
Season of Love / La saison de lamour /
Mawsim hubb (Rashid Masharawi)
2002
Divine Intervention / Intervention divine /
Yadun Ilahiyya (Elia Suleiman)
Ford Transit (Hany Abu Assad) (documentary)
In the Ninth Month / Au neuvime mois / Fishah al-tasi (Ali Nassar)
Jenin, Jenin / Jnine, Jnine (Mohamed Bakri)
Jeremy Hardy vs. the Israeli Army (Leila
Sansour) (documentary)
The Olive Harvest / La cueillette des olives /
Mawsim al-zaytun (Hanna Elias)
Personal Inquiry / Enqute personnelle (Ula
Tabari) (documentary)
Ranas Wedding / Le mariage de Rana / Urs
Rana (Hany Abu Assad)
A Ticket to Jerusalem / Un ticket pour
Jrusalem / Tathkararaton ila al-Quds
(Rashid Masharawi)
145
2003
Arnas Children / Les enfants dArna / Atfal
Arna (Juliano Mer-Khamis) (documentary)
2004
The Last Moon / La ultima luna (Miguel
Littin*)
Sense of Need / Lpreuve du besoin (Shadi
Srour)
Thirst / Soif / Atash (Tawfik Abu Wael)
/ crivains des frontiers (Samir Abdallah
and Jose Reynes) (documentary)
2005
septembre (Osama al-Zain)
Paradise Now / al-Jinna alaam (Hany Abu
Assad)
2006
Beirut: Truth, Lies and Videos / Beyrouth:
vrits, mensonges et vidos (Ma Masri)
(documentary)
Since You Left / Depuis que tu nes plus l
/ Min youm ma ruhat (Mohamed Bakri)
(documentary)
Waiting / Attente / Intizar (Rashid
Masharawi)
2007
33 Days / 33 jours / 33 yaoum (Ma Masri)
(documentary)
2008
After the War ... / Aprs la guerre, cest toujours la guerre (Samir Abdullah) (documentary)
Lailas Birthday / Lanniversaire de Laila / Eid
milad Laila (Rashid Masharawi)
Pomegranates and Myrrh / La grenade et la
myrrhe / Al-Mor wa al-rumman (Najwa
Najjar)
The Roof / Le toit / al-Sateh (Kamal al-Jafari)
(documentary)
Salt of This Sea / Le sel de la mer / Milh hadha
al-bahr (Annemarie Jacir)
Shadow of Absence / Lombre de labsence /
Dhil al-gheyab (Nasri Hajjaj)
Slingshot Hip Hop (Jacqueline Salloum)
(documentary)
2009
Amerrika / Amreeka (Cherien Dabis)
146
The Time That Remains / Le temps quil reste /

al-Zaman al-baqi (Elia Suleiman)
Short Filmmakers
Hiam Abbas, Walid Abdelhadi, Firas Abdelrahman, Samir Abdullah, Ahmad Abou-Zeid,
Khadija Abu Ali, Mohamed Abu Dayyeh,
Wael Abu Diqqa, Dima Abu Ghoush, Umayya
Abu Hanna, Saed Abu Hmud, Darwish Abu
Rish, Ahmad Abu Sada, Franois Abu Salem, Dahna Aburahme, Abdel Menem Adwan, Amir Ahmaro, Imad Ahmed, Akram
al-Ashqar, Mohamed Alatar, Muayad Moussa
Alayan, Darin Ali al-Baw, Mamoun al-Buna,
Hikmat al-Dawud, Yousef al-Deek, Ghasoub
Aleddin, Rowan al-Faqih, Ismail Alhabbash,
Azza al-Hassan, Raed al-Helou, Kamal alJafari, Laith al-Juneidi, Basil al-Khatib, Nabil
Issa al-Khatib, Izzidrin al-Masri, Omar al-Qattan, Mohamed al-Sawalmeh, Sama Alshaibi,
Bakr al-Shirqawi, Nada al-Yassir, Sobhi al-Zobadi, Raed Andoni, Saed Andoni, Alia Arasoughli, Suha Arraf, Georgina Asfour, Hanna
Selim Attallah, Gibril Awwad, Hahed Awwad,
Mohamed Ayache, George Azar, Layaly Badr,
Liana Badr, Salah al-Din Badr Khan, Yahya
Barakat, Rima Barrak, Amahl Bishara, Walid
Bitrawi, Lina Bokhary, Youssef Chabaane, Ismal Chamout, Fady Copty, Cherien Dabis,
Rawen Damen, Nicolas Damuni, Hikmat
Daoud, Iyad Daoud, Nazih Darwaza, Swasan
Darwaza, Ziad Darwish, Salim Daw, Riyad
Deis, Sahera Dirbas, Zeina Durra, Laila El
Haddad, Majdi El Omari, Jamal El Yasin,
Nada El Yasir, Rima Essa, Saeed Taji Farouky,
Ali Fawzi, Mahdi Fleifel, Issa Freij, Maryse
Gargour, Raneen Geries, Ahmad Habash, Ismal Habash, Mahmoud Halil, Anwar Hasen,
Faycal BK Hassairi, Mona Hatoum, Riyad
Ideis, Nabila Irshaid, Suheir Ismael, Azz alDin Ismail, Hadi Jadallah, Ihab Jadallah, Sulafa Jadallah, Jennifer Jajeh, Hani Johariya,
Mohamed Salah Kayali, Hichem Kayed, Jamal
Khalaile, Mahmoud Khalil, Ibrahim Khill,
George Khleifi, Buthina Canaan Khoury, Rina
Khoury, Nabiha Lutfi, Seoud Mahanna, Lina
Makboul, Aseel Mansour, Erbisam Maraana,
Norma Marcos, Tayseer Mashareqa, Izidore
Musallim, Hanna Musleh, Enas Muthaffar,

Razi Najjar, Nadine Naous, Rosalind Nashashibi, Omar Nazzal, May Odeh, Edna
Politi, Tony Qadh, Oussama Qashoo, Kristan
Qazi, Raad Raad, Mohamed Rum, Muhmud
Ibrahim Saadi, Mazen Saadeh, Akram Safadi,
Marwan Salameh, Liana Saleh, Suzy Salmy,
Ihab Salti, Larissa Sansour, Layla Sayegh,
Qasim Shaban, Nadine Shamounki, Nazim
Sharidi, Abdel Salam Shehada, Amer Shomali, Nida Sinnokrot, Helga Tawil, Ghada Te
rawi, Mohanad Yaqubi, Susan Youssef, Nasri
Zakharia, Manar Zoabi, Sameh Zoabi, Taher
Zoabi, Hicham Zraiek.
Palestine: References
Abdel-Malek, Kamal. The Rhetoric of

Violence: Arab-Jewish Encounters in
Contemporary Palestinian Literature and
Film. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Bresheeth, Haim. The Continuity of
Trauma and Struggle: Recent Cinematic
Representations of the Nakba. In Nakba:
Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory,
ed. Ahmed H. Sadi and Lila AbuLugod, pp. 161187. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007.
. Segell Ikhtifa / Chronicle of a
Disappearance. In The Cinema of North
Africa and the Middle East, ed. Gnl
Dnmetz-Colin, pp. 168178. London:
Wallflower Press, 2007.
Dabashi, Hamid, ed. Dream of a Nation: On
Palestinian Cinema. London: Verso, 2006.
Di Giorgi, Sergio, and Joan Rundo. Una Terra
promessa dal cinema: Appunti sul nuovo
cinema palestinese. Palermo: Edizioni della
Battaglia and La Luna nel Pozzo, 1998.
Gertz, Nurith, and George Khleifi.
Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma
and Memory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Hennebelle, Guy, and Janine Euvrard, eds.
Israel Palestine: Que peut le cinma. Paris:
Socit Africaine ddition / LAfrique
Littraire et Artistique 47, 1978.
Hennebelle, Guy, and Khmais Khayati, eds.
La Palestine et le cinma. Paris: E.100, 1977.
Hillhauer, Rebecca. Palestine. In
147
Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers,

pp. 196243. Cairo: American University in
Cairo Press, 2005.
Karmy, Boulos. Le cinma palestinien: en
attendant la fiction. In Les cinmas arabes,
ed. Mouny Berrah, Jacques Lvy, and
Claude-Michel Cluny, pp. 9093. Paris:
ditions du Cerf / Institut du Monde Arabe
/ CinmAction 43, 1987.
Khayati, Khmais. The Palestinian Cinema.
In Il cinema dei paesi arabi, Quarta
edizione / Arab Film Festival, 4th ed., pp.
7179. Naples: Fondazione Labatorio
Mediterraneo, 1997.
Khleifi, Michel. Noce en Galile (script). Paris:
Krifat, Michel. Gros Plan sur le cinma palestinien. In Sixime Biennale des cinmas
arabes Paris, pp. 93127. Paris: Institut du

Monde Arabe, 2002.
Masri, Ma, and Jean Chamoun. Contre la
guerre-spectacle (interview with Hubert
Corbin and Michle Driguez). In Actes des
10e rencontres cinmatographiques, pp.
9197. Montpellier: Festival de Montpellier,
1998.
Ramahi, Suyan. Cinma palestinien. In La
semaine du cinma arabe, pp. 6166. Paris:
Institut du Monde Arabe, 1987.
Thoraval, Yves. Palestine: Images dune
nation errante. In Les crans du croissant
fertile, pp. 5980. Paris: Atlantica / Sguier,
2002.
Thouard, Sylvie, ed. Palestine-Israelterritoires cinmatographiques. La revue
documentaire 1929 (2005): 5124.
Syria
Amiralay, Ismal Anzur, Ayyub Badri, Amin

Bounni, Raymond Boutros, Salah Dehni, Mohamed Dhiaddine, Khatib El Bassel, Ahmed
Erfan, Marwan Haddad, Haytham Hakki,
Khaled Hamadeh, Maher Kaddo, Kanam
Kanam, Souheil Kanaan, Sokheie Kawaan,
Georges Khoury, Koshav, Dureid Lahham,
Mohamed Malas, Hatem Mohamed, Oussama
Mohammad, Mohamed Muwaddin, Ruba
Nadda, Mustafa Rashid, Joud Saeed, Bashir
Safia, Mohamed Salah, Nazih Shahbandar,
Mohamed Shahin, Riyad Shayya, Ghassan
Shmeit, Mohamed Solfan, Wadeih Yousef,
Samir Zikra.

GDP: 17,061m
GDP per head: 879
Capital city: Damascus (population:
2,466,000)
Feature Films: 137
1930s
2
1940s
1
1950s
2
1960s
11
1970s
67
1980s
18
1990s
18
2000s
18
Syrian Feature Filmmakers: 48
Abdelatif Abdelhamid, Marouan Akkachi,
Mustapha Akkad, Hala al-Abdallah Yakoub,
Ammar al-Beik, Nidal al-Dibs, Marouan Alkawey, Abderrahman al-Khayali, Khaldoun
al-Mahled, Nabil al-Maleh, Waha al-Raheb,
Bilal al-Sabouni, Zuhayr al-Shawwa, Omar

Working in Syria: 16
Borhan Alawiyya, Hassan al-Safi, Qays
al-Zubaydi, Seif-Eddine Chawkat, Ahmed
Fouad, Nagdi Hafez, Qassim Hawal, Youssef
Maalouf, Rida Myassar, Helmi Rafla, Hassab
Reda, Tewfiq Saleh, Atef Salem, Mohamed
Selmane, Saed Tantawi, Boshko Votchinitch
(marked with an asterisk [*] in the chronology).
148
Chronology
1931
Under the Skies of Damascus / Sous le ciel
de Damas / Tahta sama Dimask (Ismal
Anzur)
1937
The Call of Duty / Lappel du devoir / Nadaalwajih (Ayyub Badri)
1947
Light and Darkness / Lumire et tnbre /
Nouron wa thilal (Nazih Shahbandar)
1950
The Green Valley / La valle verte / al-Wadi
al-akhdar (Zuhayr al-Shawwa)
The Passer-By / Le passant / Abir sabil
(Ahmed Erfan)
1963
Beyond the Borders / Au-del des frontires /
Wara al-hudud (Zuhayr al-Shawwa)
1964
A City Rose / Une rose de la ville / Zahratun
min al-madina (Mohamed Shahin)
1966
The Lorry Driver / Le camioneur / Saiq ashshahina (Boshko Votchinitch*)
Satans Game / Le jeu de Satan / Laabart ashshaytan (Zuhayr al-Shawwa)
1967
Love in Constantinople / Amour
Constantinople (Seif-Eddine Chawkat*)
Meeting of Strangers / Rencontre des
trangres (Sayed Tantawi*)
The Outlaws / Les hors-la-loi (Youssef
Maalouf*)
Women Naked without Sin / Femmes nues
sans pch (Koshav)
1969
Operations at 6 Oclock / Oprations six
heures / Amalyat al-saa 6 (Seif-Eddine
Chawkat*)
Three Operations in Palestine / Trois
Oprations en Palestine / Thalath amaliyyatdkhil Filistin (Mohamed Salah and
Abderrahman al-Khayali)
Womens Tailor / Tailleur pour les dames (Atef
Salem*)
1970
The Hand / La main / al-Yad (Qassim Hawal*)
Men Under the Sun / Des hommes sous le
soleil / Rijalun tahta ash-shams (Nabil alMaleh, Mohamed Shahin and Mohamed
Muwaddin)
The Two Friends / Les deux amis (Hassan
al-Safi*)
A Useful Man / Un homme convenable (Helmi
Rafla*)
1971
Bridge of the Wicked / Le Pont des mchants
(Nagdi Hafez*)
One Plus One / 1 + 1 (Youssef Maalouf*)
A Woman Alone / Une femme seule (Nagdi
Hafez*)
1972
Another Facet of Love / Une autre facette de
lamour / Wahj akhar lil-hob (Mohamed
Shahin)
The Beautiful Shepherdess / La belle bergre
(Atef Salem*)
The Crisis of the Young / La crise des jeunes
(Nagdi Hafez*)
The Duped / Les dupes / al-Makhdhououn
(Tewfiq Saleh*)
Journey of Love / Voyage damour (Youssef
Maalouf*)
The Knife / Le couteau / al-Sikkin (Khaled
Hamadeh)
The Leopard / Le lopard / al-Fahd (Nabil
al-Maleh)
Loves Subterfuges / Les subterfuges damour
(Youssef Maalouf*)
Mexico Trip / Des aventures comiques au
Mexique (Seif-Eddine Chawkat*)
The Quiet City / La ville tranquille (Hassan
Reda*)
The World in the Year 2000 / Le monde en lan
2000 (Ahmed Fouad*)
1973
Cruel Woman / Femme cruelle (Mohamed
Shahin)
Flat for Love / Appartement de lamour (Nagdi
Hafez*)
A Forced Marriage / Un mariage forc (Rida
Myassar*)
nuit damour (Seif-Eddine Chawkat*)
Muse and Amber / Muse et ambres (Mohamed
Dhiaddine)
My Wifes a Hippy / Ma femme Youppie /
Zawjati min hippies (Atef Salem*)
October Is Coming / Loctobre vient / Wa ja
tashrn (Wadeih Yousef)
The Prostitutes of the Al Aram Avenue / Les
prostitues de lavenue Al Aram (Nagdi
Hafez*)
The Wounded Ballerina / La ballerine blesse /
Rqisa al al-firh (Mohamed Shahin)
1974
Al-Yazirli (Qays al-Zubaydi*)
Battle in the Desert / Combat dans le dsert
(Mohamed Selmane*)
The Celebration / La fte (Bashir Safia)
The Crossing / La traverse / al-Ekhtiraq
(Kanem Kanem)
Everday Life in a Syrian Village / La vie
quotidien dans un village syrien / Al-hayat
al-yawmiya fi qaria Suriya (Omar Amiralay)
(documentary)
The Five Master Singers / Les cinq matres
chanteurs (Nagdi Hafez*)
The Heros Storm Cloud / La nue du hros
(Marouan Akkachi)
The Heroic Airforce Formations / Les
hroiques formations ariennes / Kharq elakhtr (Marouan Alkawey)
The Horsemen of Liberation / Les cavaliers de
la libration (Souheil Kanaan)
Jealous James Bond / James Bond, le jaloux /
Ghawar James Bond (Nabil al-Maleh)
Kafr Kassem (Borhan Alawiya*)
The Mameluke Jabers Adventure / Laventure
du Mamelouk Jaber / Mughamarat alMamluk Jaber (Mohamed Shahin)
The Progressive / Le Progressiste / al-Sayyid
al-taqaddumi (Nabil al-Maleh)
Shame / La honte / al-Ar (Bilal al-Sabouni,
Bashir Safia, and Wadeih Yousef)
The Tents of Qaraqoz / Khaymatu Quaraqoz
(Mohamed Shahin)
Voyage of Suffering / Voyage des souffrances
(Rida Myassar*)
1975
The Agitators / Les fauteurs (Mohamed
Shahin)
The Beauty and the Four Looks / La belle et les
quatre regards (Seif-Eddine Chawkat*)
Conqueror of Space / Conqurant de lespace
(Sokheie Kawaan)
Good Night / Bonne nuit (Khaldoun alMahled)
149
If I Die Twice I Would Love You / Je meurs
deux fois je taimerais (Georges Khoury)
Mens Nights / Nuits des hommes (Hassan
al-Safi*)
Official Mission / Mission officielle (SeifEddine Chawkat*)
Sabiha, Seductress of the Desert / Sabiha la
sductrice du dsert (Mohamed Solfan)
The Wrong Way / Direction oppose / al-Ittijh
al-mukis (Marwan Haddad)
1976
Al-Tharwa al-samakia (Wadeih Yousef)
The Jesters Love / Lamour du bouffon /
Gharm al-muharrij (Bashir Safia)
Manhunt / La chasse lhomme / Saydu alrijl (Bashir Safia)
1977
Arrivals from the Sea / Les arrivants par la
mer (Seif-Eddine Chawkat*)
Dont Say Goodbye to a Day Thats Scarcely
Gone / Ne dites pas adieu un jour qui na
gure pass / La taqIuli wadan lil-ams
(Mohamed Shahin)
Forbidden Love / Lamour interdit (Khaled
Hamadeh)
deux fois / al-Abtal yuadun marrayayn
(Salah Dehni)
The Horseman of Bani Abes / Le cavalier de
Bani Abes (Mohamed Selmane*)
The Jungle of Wolves / Le jungle des loups /
Ghbatu al-dib (Mohamed Shahin)
Red, White and Black / Le rouge, le blanc et
le noir / al-Ahmar wa al-abyadwa al-aswad
(Bashir Safia)
1978
Farewell to the Past / Adieu au pass
(Mohamed Shahin)
1979
The Fifth Arm of the Prison / La cinquime
citadelle / al-Qala al-khmisa (Bilal alSabouni)
The Report / Le rapport (Haytham Hakki)
Sweet Like a Berry, My Love / Doux comme un
baie, mon amour / Habibati ya hab al-tout
(Marwan Haddad)
The Trap / Le pige / al-Masyada (Wadeih
Yousef)
150
1980
Fragments of Images / Fragments dimages /
Baqaya suwar (Nabil al-Maleh)
Lion of the Desert / Le lion du dsert / Omar
al-Mukhtar (Mustapha Akkad)
1981
Love for Life / Lamour pour la vie / Hubbun
lil-hayt (Bashir Safia)
1982
Ghawars Empire (Bashir Safia)
A Murder Step by Step / Un meutre pas pas
/ Qatlun ... an tariq al-tasalsul (Mohamed
Shahin)
1983
The Drama of a Girl from the East / Le drame
dune fille de lorient / Maasat fatt sharqiya
(Mohamed Shahin)
The Game of Love and Death / Le jeu de
lamour et de la mort / Lubatu al-hubb was
al-gatl (Mohamed Shahin)
The Half-Metre Incident / Laccident du demimtre / Hadithat al-nisf mitr (Samir Zikra)
Story of a Dream / Histoire dun rve / Tarick
hulm (Nabil al-Maleh)
1984
Borders / Les frontires / al-Hudud (Dureid
Lahham)
City Dreams / Les rves de la ville / Ahlam alMadina (Mohamed Malas)
On a Rainy Day / Un jour pluvieux / Fi yawmin mumtir (Mohamed Shahin)
1985
Smiling through the Tears / Le sourire travers
les larmes / Basima baynaal-dum (Wadeih
Yousef),
Vendetta of Love / Vendetta damour / alIntiqam hubban (Wadeih Yousef)
1986
(Samir Zikra)
The Report / Le rapport / al-Taqrr (Dureid
Lahham)
1988
Stars in Broad Daylight / toiles du jour /
Nujum al-nahar (Oussama Mohammad)
1989
The Nights of the Jackal / Les nuits du chacal /
Layali ibn awa (Abdelatif Abdelhamid)
1990
The Attachment / Lattachement / al-Mahabba
(Dureid Lahham)
1991
Cloud / Nuage / Sahb (Mohamed Shahin)
The Greedy Ones / Les gourmands a.k.a. Les
algues deau douce / al-Tahalib (Raymond
Boutros)
Kafrun (Dureid Lahham)
Palestinian Memories / Mmoires palestiniennes (Amin Bounni) (documentary)
Verbal Messages / Messages verbaux / Rasail
al Shafahyya (Abdellatif Abdelhamid)
1992
The Night / La nuit / al-Layl (Mohamed
Malas)
1993
The Extras / Les figurants / al-Kombars (Nabil
al-Maleh)
The Lovers of the Demarcation Line of the
Rain / Les amants de la ligne de dmarcation de la pluie / Ushaq ala khat al-matar
(Mustafa Rashid)
Noises from All Sides / Le hnissement des
directions / Sahil al-jibat (Maher Kaddo)
Oh Sea / Oh mer (Mohamed Shahin)
Something Is Burning / Quelque chose brle /
Shayma yahtariq (Ghassan Shmeit)
1995
Al-Lajat (Riyad Shayya)
1996
The Rising Rain / La monte de la pluie / Suud
al-matar (Abdellatif Abdelhamid)
1997
The Displacement / Le dplacement / al-Terhal
(Raymond Boutros)
1998
A Land for Strangers / La terre des trangers /
Turab al-ajaneb (Samir Zikra)
The Souls Breath / Le souffle de lme /
Nassim ar-ruh (Abdellatif Abdelhamid)
1999
The Moneylender / Lusurier / al-Marabi
(Mohamed Shahin)
2000
The Last Message / Le dernier message (Khatib
El Bassel)
2001
Black Flour / La farine noire / al-Tahin alAswad (Ghassan Shmeit)
Sacrifices / Sanduq al-dunia (Oussama
Mohammad)
Two Moons and an Olive Tree / Deux lunes
et un olivier / Qamarn wa zayrunah
(Abdellatif Abdelhamid).
2003
Dreamy Visions / Visions chimriques / Raa
halima (Waha al-Raheb)
2004
Sabah (Ruba Nadda)
2005
Passions / Bab el-maqam (Mohamed Malas)
Public Relations / Relations publiques /
Alaqat ammah (Samir Zikra)
Under the Ceiling / Sous le toit / Tahta al-saqf
(Nidal al-Dibs)
2006
I Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her
Grave / Je suis celle qui porte les fleurs vers
sa tombe (Hala al-Abdallah Yakoub and
Ammar al-Beik) (documentary)
2007
I.D. / Vos papiers (Ghassan Shmeit)
Out of Coverage / Hors rseau / Kahref altaghtiya (Abdellatif Abdelhamid)
2008
Days of Boredom / Jours dennui / Ayyam aldajar (Abdellatif Abdelhamid)
Hasiba (Raymond Boutros)
Hey! Dont Forget the Cumin / H! Noublie
pas le cumin (Hala al-Abdallah Yacoub)
(documentary)
2009
Gate of Heaven / La porte au ciel / Bawabet
al-janna (Maher Kaddo)
Long Night, The / La longue nuit (Hatem
Mohamed)
Once More / Encore une fois / Mara okhra
(Joud Saeed)
Short Filmmakers
Ghassan Abdallah, Bashar Akad, Maamoun
al-Bunni, Tanjour Alfounz, Reem Ali, Khaldoun al-Mahled, Meyer al-Roumi, Mohamed
al-Roumi, Hicham al-Zouki, Ayham Arsan,
Ghassan Bayous, Ala-Eddine Chaar, Mahmoud Chabaane, Houssam Chahadat, Mohamed Youssef Dayoub, Ali Deyoub, Diana
151
El Jeiroudi, Abeer Esber, Youssef Fahdah,
Joude Gorani, Inas Hakki, Nadia Hamzeh,
Walid Hreib, Bassam Hussein, Oussama Husseini, Mouneir Jahami, Karsan Jahry, Mounir
Jbawi, Soudade Kaadan, Sam Kadi, Saleh
Kasem, Mouaffak Kat, Mano Khalil, Kosa
Khouly, Lotfi Lotfi. Hind Midani, Salah Eddine Mohamed, Hala Mohammed, Ramez
Mouchechawi, Marwan Muadhdhen, Nasser
Naasani, Ahmed Farouk Ohisi, Ayman Orsan,
Farouk Oubassi, Riad Hani Raad, Joud Said,
Maher Salibi, Salah Sermini, Alfouz Tanjour,
Fajr Yacoub, Hadar Yaziji.
Syria: References
Abdel Wahed, Mahmud. Syrian Cinema:

History and Evolution. In Il cinema dei
paesi arabi, Quarta edizione / Arab Film
Festival, 4th ed., pp. 127182. Naples:
Fondazione Labatorio Mediterraneo, 1997.
Abdelhamid, Abdellatif. Comme un fil de
soie dans les curs (interview). In Cinma
et Mediterrane (Actes du 11e Festival
International de Montpellier), pp. 195202.
Montpellier: Festival de Montpellier /
Climat, 1989.
. La pluie est porteuse de fertilit
(interview with Henri Talvat). In Actes
du 18e Festival International, pp. 5556.
Al-Roumi, Mayyar [Meyar], and Dorothe
Schmid. Le cinma syrien: du militan
tisme au mutisme. In Cinma et monde
musulman, cultures et interdits. EuOrient
10 (2001): 425.
Chikhaoui, Tahar, ed. Spcial: La nuit de
Mohamed Malas. Tunis: dition Sahar /
Cincrits 9, 1995.
Cluny, Claude Michel. Le cinma syrien:
une dizaine de bons films. In Les cinmas
arabes, ed. Mouny Berrah, Jacques Lvy,
and Claude-Michel Cluny, p. 75. Paris:
/ CinmAction 43, 1987
. Syrieun trs proche orient.
Cinma 75 197 (1975): 100101.
Corbin, Hubert, et al. tat du cinma
syrien. Roundtable discussion with
Omar Amiralay, Mohamed Malas, and
152
Samir Zikra. In Actes des 19e Rencontres

Cinmatographiques, pp. 101109.
Dehni, Salah. History of the Syrian Cinema
and The Syrian Cinema in 1963. In The
Cinema in the Arab Countries, pp. 98107,
179181. Beirut: Interarab Centre of
Cinema and Television, 1966.
. Une volution difficile au service
du cinma arabe. Cinma 75 197 (1975):
102115.
. Quand cinma et tlvision se regardent en chiens de faence. In Les cinmas
arabes, ed. Mouny Berrah, Jacques Lvy,
and Claude-Michel Cluny, pp. 7275. Paris:
/ CinmAction 43, 1987.
Hakki, Hayt ham. Regard sur le documentaire syrien. In Festival: Images du monde
arabe, pp. 80111. Paris: Institut du Monde
Arabe, 1993.
Hillhauer, Rebecca. Syria. In Encyclopedia
of Arab Women Filmmakers, pp. 244255.
2005.
Jabbour, Diana. Syrian Cinema: Culture
and Ideology. In Screens of Life: Critical
Film Writing from the Arab World, ed Alia
Arasoughli, pp. 4062. Quebec: World
Heritage Press, 1998.
Kilani, Dr. Ibrahim, and Salah Dehni. The
Cinema and Television in Syria, Their
History and Future. In Arab Cinema and
Culture, vol. 3, pp. 52113. Beirut: Arab
Film and Television Centre, 1964.
Malas, Mohamed. The Dream: Extracts from

a Film Diary. In Arab Cinematics: Toward
the New and the Alternative, ed. Ferial J.
Ghazoul, pp. 208228. Cairo: American
University in Cairo / Alif 15, 1999.
. Le cauchemar palestinien (interview with Hubert Corbin). In Actes des
9e Rencontres, pp. 115116. Montpellier:
Festival de Montpellier, 1987.
Mohammad, Oussama. Quand les gens sont
sincres, ils se ressemblent (interview with
Henri Talvat). In Actes des 10e Rencontres
Cinmatographiques, pp. 98100.
Mounir, Zamni. Le cinma syrien au pass
et au prsent. In La semaine du cinma
arabe, pp. 6771. Paris: Institut du Monde
Arabe, 1987.
Petiot, Benote, and Pierre Petiot. Syrie,
mtaphores et ralits historiques.
Roundtable discussion with Mohamed
Malas and Nabil al-Maleh. In Actes des 21e
Rencontres, pp. 3034. Montpellier: Festival
de Montpellier, 1999.
Salti, Rasha, ed. Insights into Syrian
Cinema: Essays and Conversations with
Contemporary Filmmakers. New York:
Rattapallax Press / Arte East, 2006.
. Nujum al-Nahar / Stars in Broad
Daylight. In The Cinema of North Africa
and the Middle East, ed. Gnl DnmetzColin, pp. 101110. London: Wallflower
Press, 2007.
Thoraval, Yves. Syrie: Filmer malgr la censure. In Les crans du croissant fertile, pp.
81101. Paris: Atlantica / Sguier, 2002.
Zikra, Samir. force de mentir, on finit par
se croire (interview with Hubert Corbin).
In Actes des 9e Rencontres, pp. 110114.
The Gulf
The Six Members of the Gulf Cooperation
Council, plus Yemen
Over all Feature Films: 23
Overall Feature Filmmakers: 18
Nujoon al-Ghanem (United Arab Emirates),
Hassan al-Halibi (Bahrain), Maher al-Khaja
(United Arab Emirates), Hkalia al-Meraikhy
(Qatar), Abdullah al-Moheissen (Saudi Arabia), Hani al-Shaibani (United Arab Emirates),
Khadija al-Salami (Yemen), Khalid al-Siddick (Kuwait), Bassam al-Thawadi (Bahrain),
Mohamed al-Traifi (United Arab Emirates),
Khalid al-Zadjali (Oman), Amer al-Zuhair
(Kuwait), Bader Ben Hirsi (Yemen), Abdullah
Boushahri (Kuwait), Saleh Karama (United
Arab Emirates), Hashim Muhammad (Kuwait), Izzadore Mussalem (Saudi Arabia)
There are also 487 Gulf short filmmakers
(fiction and documentary) (394 of these from
the UAE and mostly students).
The Gulf: References
Al-Sanoussi, Muhammad. The Cinema and

Television in Kuwait. In Arab Cinema and
Culture, vol. 3, pp. 2627. Beirut: Arab Film
and Television Centre, 1964.
Bahrain
Size: 278 square miles
GDP: 8,206m
GDP per head: 11,106
Capital city: Manama (population: 157,000)
153
The Cinema in the Arabian Peninsula.
Interarab Centre of Cinema and Television,
1966.
El Sanussi, Muhammad. Cinema and TV
in Kuwait. In The Cinema in the Arab
Countries, ed. Georges Sadoul, pp. 187188.
Beirut: Interarab Centre of Cinema and
Television, 1966.
Hillhauer, Rebecca. Yemen and Other
Countries. In Encyclopedia of Arab
Women Filmmakers, pp. 256262, 415419.
2005.
Naji, Andel Sattar. Le cinma et la tlvision
dans les pays du Golfe: Ralits et ambitions. In Cinquime Biennale des cinmas
arabes Paris, pp. 100107. Paris: Institut
du Monde Arabe, 2000.
See also the documentation relating to the
Dubai International Film Festival (Dubai,
from 2004), the Middle East International
Film Festival (Dubai, from 2007), and the
Emirates Film Competition (Abu Dhabi,
from 2002).
2003
Visitor / Visiteur (Bassam al-Thawadi)
2008
Bahraini Tale / Un conte de Bahrain / Hekaya
Bahrainiya (Bassam al-Thawadi)
Four Girls / Quatre filles (Hassan al-Halibi)
Chronology
Short Filmmakers
Feature films:
1988
The Obstacle / Lobstacle / Al-hajiz (Bassam
al-Thawadi)
Hussain Ghulom Abbas (Abu Jalal), Ali alAli, Abdulla Mohammad Jawad Albzzaz,
Baqer Sadiq Zain Aldeen, Ebrahim Rashid
al-Doseri, Gamal al-Gheilan, Hussain Abbas
154
al-Hulaybi, Majeed Radhi Ali, Jaafar al-Qadami, Mohammad Noaman Alqasab, Hussein
al-Riffaei, Nidhal Bader, Riyadh Balwai, Mohamed Rashed Bu-Ali, Jaffar Hamza, Anwar
Mohamed Hayat, Khalid Yousif Janabi, Nizar
Jawad, Mohamed Yousif Janabi, Nizar Jawad,

Majeed Kadhmi, Mohammed Ibrahim Mohammed, Yaser Naser, Mohamed Numan,
Abdula Rashdan, Khalifa Shahin Cheker Bin
Yahmed.
Kuwait
1985
Chahin / Shhn (Khalid al-Siddick)
2006
Losing Ahmad / En perdant Ahmad (Abdullah
Boushahri)
2007
When the People Spoke / Lorsque le peuple a
parl / Indama rtakalam al-shaab (Amer
al-Zuhair) (documentary)

GDP: 52,510m
Capital city: Kuwait City (population:
2,063,000)
Chronology
Feature films:
1972
The Cruel Sea / Basya bahr (Khalid alSiddick)
1976
The Wedding of Zein / Les noces de Zein / Urs
al-Zayn (Khalid al-Siddick)
1979
The Silence / Le silence / al-Samt (Hashim
Muhammad)
Short Filmmakers
Ali Mohammad Afjjar, Meshari al-Arouj,
Walid al-Awadi, Faisal S. al-Duwaisan, Fathia
Alhaddad, Zeyed Alhusaini, Faisal Alibrahim,
Abdulrahman al-Khalifi, Meqdad al-Kout,
Nouri al-Saleh, Mohamed al-Sanousi, Tareq
al-Zamel, Dadeq Hussain Behbehani, Najm
Abdel Karim, Naser Kermani, Abdulwahab
Sultan.
Oman
Short Filmmakers

GDP: 18,290m
GDP per head: 7,183
Capital city: Muscat (population: 620,000)
Hamid al-Adwani, Jasim Albatashe, Abdullah Albatashi, Yusef Hassan al-Bloshi, Khalid Salem Alkalbani, Dawood al-Kiumi, Yasir
al-Kiyumi, Amer al-Rawas, Hamid bin Salem
Alshakaili, Mazin Habib.
Chronology
Feature film:
2006
The Dawn / Laube / Al-Boom (Khalid alZadjali)
155
Qatar
Short Filmmakers

GDP: 26,941m
Capital city: Doha (population: 370,656)
Abdulla Abdukaziz Abdulla, Abdulla Hafez

Ali, Hafiz Ali Ali, Mahdi Ali Ali, Meshaal Ali
Alkubaisi, Khalid Almahmoud, Mohammed
Alomany, Dawoud Hassan.
Chronology
Feature film:
2006
Threads Beneath Sands / Des fils sous le sable /
Khyoot taht al-rimal (Khalifa al-Meraikly)
Saudi Arabia
GDP: 178,300m
GDP per head: 405
Capital city: Riyadh (population: 4,465,000)
Chronology
Feature films:
2006
How Are Things? / Aujourdhui et demain /
Keif al-hal (Izzadore Mussalem*)
Shadow of Silence / Les ombres du silence /
Dhalal al-samt (Abdullah al-Moheissen)
Short Filmmakers
Akram Agha, Mahmoud Salem Ba Ajajah,
Hisham Mansour al-Abidi, Ali Hasan Mohamed Alameer, Mansour al-Badran, Mohamed al-Basha, Noor al-Dabbagh, Khalid
al-Dakheel, Nedhal K. al-Demashqi, Meshal
Mohamed al-Enzi, Abdullah al-Eyaf, Bader
Abdul Majeed al-Homoud, Hafaa al-Mansour, Bashir Hassan al-Mohaishi, Rja Sair
al-Motri, Abdulaziz Nasser al-Nejaim, Mohammed Mahde al-Obaid, Abdullah Ibrahim Alomain, Faisal Shadid Alotaibi, Omer
Abdalaziz al-Robea, Moussa Jafer Altunayan,
Tawfik Alzeidi, Farah Ibrahim Arif, Samir
Ibrahim Arif, Abdullah Awad, Mohamed Bazaid, Mohammed Helal, Aseel Lababidi, Jasim
Ali Oqaili, Mamdouh Salem, Hamzeh Ahmed
Fakhri Tarzan.
156
United Arab Emirates

GDP: 93,056m
Capital city: Abu Dhabi (population:
1,493,000)
Chronology
Feature films:
2005
A Dream (Hani al-Shaibani)
2006
Haneen (Mohamed al-Traifi)
2007
Jumaa and the Sea / Jumaa wa al-Bahr (Hani
al-Shaibani)
2008
Al Mureed (Nujoom al-Ghanem)
Henna (Saleh Karama)
2009
The Fifth Chamber Ouija / La cinquime
chambre dOuija (Maher al-Khaja)
Short Filmmakers
(Mostly Students)
Mustafa Abbas, Marwa Abboud, Hussain
Nabil Abdalla, Mona Abdallah, Naima Abdelwahab, Sara Tarek Abdou, Hani Abdul Azeem,
Samantha Abdulaziz, Heba Abdulhalek, Heba
Abdulkhalek, Suhail Matar Abdulla, Wedima
Bilal Abdulla, Khalid Abdullah, Dawood Mohammed Hassan Abdulrahman, Adel Abed,
Abdulrahman Aoubayda, Amjad Abu al-Ala,
Khalid Mahmoud Abu Goumasaah, Shamma
Abu Nawas, Nermeen Kamel Adam, Jaidaa
Adel, Reema Adhami, Asma Ahmad, Nazima
Ahmad, Abdul Rahman Abubaker Ahmed,
Abdullah Hassan Ahmed, Ahmed Abdulla
Ahmed, Asma Ahmed, Bader Ahmed, Roqia
Murad Hohammed Ahmed, Yousef Hussain
Ahmed, Ali al-Abdool, Khalid Ibrahim al-Abdooli, Khadher al-Aidarous, Alaa Mohammed
al-Akawi, Masoud Amralla al-Ali, Saeeda alAmeri, Reem al-Moodi, Sara al-Aqeeli, Zinab
al-Ashoor, Lama al-Askari, Nadia Ahmed
al-Awadi, Hamad Mansour Alawar, Maryam
al-Awar, Shoug al-Banna, Aballa Mohamed

al-Bloushi, Shaikha Rashed al-Braikhi, Kha
dija Hussain al-Buloshi, Saeed Aldaheri, Salma Khaifa al-Darmaki, Hessa Abdulla Rashed
al-Dhahery, Ahmed Saeed Ali al-Dhahiri,
Hiba Ahmad al-Dhahri, Heba al-Dhanhani,
Munira al-Doseri, Ahmed Abdullah al-Emadi, Rashid Harib al-Falahi, Dara al-Farqih,
Khalid al-Fardan, Amen al-Farjani, Latifa
Saeed al-Flasy, Yasser al-Gargawi, Samira alGhaferi, Bandar Alghamdi, Mohamed Fouad
al-Haddad, Shmad Ali al-Haj, Saeed al-Hajri,
Sultan al-Halami, Salama al-Hamad, Ali alHamadi. Reem al-Hamli, Aisha al-Hamly,
Abdulla Ahmed al-Hammadi, Hamad alHammadi, Khadeeja Mohamed al-Hammadi,
Khalid Ahmed al-Hammadi, Matiam Dawood
al-Hammadi, Rana Mohamed al-Hammadi,
Mohamed Abdallah al-Hammady, Ameer
al-Hashemi, Buthaina al-Hashemi, Tariq alHashimi, Areej al-Hassan, Abeer Alhebsi,
Dana Ali al-Hosani, Mohammad Alhuraiz,
Khalid Ali, Sheefa Abdulla Ali, Hani Alireza,
Adel al-Jabri, Hamad al-Jabri, Nawaf al-Janahi, Mohammad al-Jassim, Hiba Saleh al-Jermi,
Abdullah Momen al-Junaibi, Afrah al-Junaibi,
Abdulla Matar al-Kaabi, Saoud Alkaabi, Nadia Mohamed Alkarimi, Ali Hassan al-Ka
theeri, Howaidi Ali al-Katheery, Sabah alKeisri, Fatima Seif Alketbi, Khahida al-Khaja,
Nayla al-Khaja, Reef al-Khaja, Farid al-Khajah, Susan al-Kaldi, Sahar al-Khatib, Yasser
al-Khayat, Khawla Zainal al-Khoori, Thuraya
al-Khoori, Amani Ahmed al-Lawghani, Juma
Hmaid al-Leem, Mohamed Allooh, Khalid
al-Mahmoud, Khaled Saleem al-Mahrouqi,
Bandar al-Mandeel, Asma al-Mansour, Mariam Abdulla al-Mansoori, Nayef al-Mansouri,
Rashid al-Marri, Roudha al-Marri, Amena
Abdul Aziz al-Marqouqi, Hind Mohammed
Almarzouqi, Salah Mohamed al-Marzouqi,
Samir Houssain al-Marzouqi, Mahmoud Yousouf al-Mashni, Asad Salem al-Mayahi, Ahmed Rashed al-Mazrooie, Afra al-Mazrouei,
Ameena Abdulla al-Mazrouie, Sahar al-Medfa, Noura al-Mehairi, Zainab Almehdi, Badria
Mohmmed al-Mehrizi, Reem al-Moodi, Amira
al-Muathen, Aisha Mohamed Obaid al-Muhairi, Amna Ateeq al-Muhairi, Fadel Saeed
al-Muhairi, Hamda Mohamed al-Muhairi,
Hana Abdullah Mohamed al-Mulla al-Muhairi, Fatma al-Mulla, Saoud Mohamed Ali
al-Mulla, Saeed Salmeen al-Murry, Fatma
Almushrraakh, Ahmed al-Mutara, Hafsa alMutawa, Khahil Sameer al-Naboulsi, Yaser
Saeed Alneydi, Ali Khalifa al-Nizer, Mohammed al-Otaiba, Nasir Alowais, Hussain alQallaf, Aisha al-Qasimi, Maryam al-Qasimi,
Maysoon al-Qassimi, Salem Faisal al-Qassimi, Bader Johar al-Qood, Mohamed Abdullah
al-Qubaisi, Mohamed Najm al-Qubaisi, Saif
Fadhel al-Rabeea. Nasser Jaber al-Rahman,
Saleh al-Rahman, Maria Mohammad al-Rais,
Khalid Alrayhi, Mohamed Jasim al-Redha,
Hamad Saif al-Reyami, Omar al-Reyami,
Salem Ghaleb al-Reyami, Yahya Bashier alRifai, Fatima Khalifa al-Romaithi, Rashed
Mohamed al-Romaithi, Salama al-Romaithi,
Shamma Mohamed al-Rumaithi, Rasha Ali
al-Saadi, Miriam al-Sabah, Awra Alsabchi,
Juma al-Sahli, Jassim Mohamed al-Salty, Mohamed al-Sanousi, Dareen al-Sarraj, Moza
Ali al-Sayed, Fatema Salem al-Shabibi, Mohamed al-Shaibani, Hassan Abdulrahman alShaikh, Abdallah al-Shami, Abdallah Rashid
al-Shamsi, Alia al-Shamsi, Shamsa al-Sharif,
Hana al-Shateri, Ibtisam Ahmed al-Shayeb,
Rashid Abdullah Abdu Aziz Alfahad Alshehhi, Walid al-Shehhi, Mustafa al-Sheikh,
Jassim Ali al-Shemsi, Ahmed Mohammed
al-Shirawi, Amena Saif al-Suboosi, Oshba Ahmad Alsuwaidi, Rehab Ibrahim al-Suwaidi,
Saeed Mohamed al-Suwaidi, Salwa Hassan
al-Suwaidi, Sumaya al-Suwaidi, Theyab alTamimi, Nasser al-Yakoubi, Naser al-Yaqobi,
Khadija al-Yousuf, Fatima al-Zaabi, Essa Alzarooni, Azza al-Zarouni, Fatima al-Ziyoudi,
Mamoun Alzoughbi, Noura Amiri, Massoud
Amrallah, Hind Amro, Ahmed Arshi, Pranav
Arya, Mohamed Ashoor, Montiana Bahgat
Ashour, Abdullah Ataya, Amina Ataya, Rehab
Omar Ateek, Hala Awadallah, Samya Ayish,
Kaltham Bader, Waeed Masood Badri, Abdallah Bastaki, Salem Belyouha, Manal Ali Bin
Amro, Maryam Bin Fahad, Nahla Bin Fahad,
Moath Bin Hafez, Hussain Bin Haider, Maitha
Mohammed Bin Owqad, Mohammed Abdulla
Bin Sougat, Ahmed Abdul Majeed Bolooki,
Yousef Bukhamas, Sahar Bustan, Drina Cabral, Souad Daou, Jasim Bou Dibs, Bara Fakhri
157
Dweik, Maitha Ebrahim, Ibrahim El Sanjak,
Carmen Elly, Mina Eltaieb, Ahmad Essam,
Wafa Faisal, Ahmed Faour, Rana Farhat, Badr
Fikree, Aymn Ibrahim Fuda, Lamya Hussein
Gargash, Maha Gargash, Samar Ghanayem,
Eiman Ahmed Ghanem, Lubnan Ghannam,
Lekha Ghosh, Lubna Jasim Habash, Aida Butti
Hadeed, Lara Osama Hafez, Mohamed Hafez,
Mohamed Abdul Rahim Haji, Feruza Haleed,
Orwa Hallak, Sarra Hamad, Yasmin Hamai
deh, Aya Kassem Hammad, Ahmed Juma
Hassan, Amira Mohammad Hassan, Reem
Ahmad Hassan, Mohamed Khahil Hosa, Rami
Hosni, Mohamed Abul Huda, Ahmed Juma Bu
Humaid, Sherine Hesham Hussein, Hussain
Ibrahim, Lamya Ibrahim, Mohamed Ibrahim,
Muneer M Ibrahim, Omar Ibrahim, Reham
Ibrahim, Sultan Abdulsalam Ibrahim, Vivian
Mamdouh Ibrahim, Yousef Ibrahim, Hassan
Ibrahim Hassan Ismail, Hiba Abdel Jaber, Jasim Jaber, Ahmad Jadallah, Ali Jamal, Taj Elsir
Idris Jaroon, Mohammed Ahmed Ali Jassim,
Ghazi Bugjah Ji, Abdullah Jingan, Mohammed Kabeel, Fadhil Abbas Mohammad Kaidy,
Hala Abu Kansoul, Farah Kassem, Dima Arabi
Katbi, Omar Kawan, Shadh Khaled, Jonathan
Ali Khan, Asma Ahmed Khouri, Ahmed Kabeer Konath, Hany Madian, Mohamed Noori
Mahmoud, Talal Mahmood, Catriona Mahmoud, Khaled Mahmoud, Mohamed Mamdouh, Ali Manea, Yasmine Marie, Mubarak
Mashi, Mohammed Matar, Reem Matloub,
Bassam Mesalatie, Osama Mesalatie, Ahmed
Meshmeshy, Hadeel Miqdadi, Ahmed Fath alBab Mohamed, Fatima Sef Mohamed, Fatima
Mohammad, Jassem Mohammed, Salwa Mohammed, Yasmin Mohammed, Reem Mohd,
Farha Moon, Ali F. Mostafa, Saud Mrwesh,
Ahmad Mustafa, Mohammed Nabhan, Yasmine Fawaz Nabulsi, Mohamed Najeeb, Haifa
Nasser, Majid Naysi, Bahman Nazari, Ahmad
Noor, Hamdah Hassan Noor, Ahmed Abdulqader Obaid, Joud Odeh, Salha Omran, Abdul Halim Ahmed Qaed, Saif Ben Qumasha,
Maryam Rahi, Khalil Abdulwahed Abdul
Rahman, Wijan Mohammad Ramadan, Hussein Abdul Rasheed, Raz, Omar Sabah, Osama
Khalid Sabbagh, Rawia Abdullah Saeed, Reem
Saeed, Sameer Saeed, Sami Safadi, Hamad Abdulla Saghran, Bassem Saimeh, Lamis Yasir
158
Salam, Nadeem A Saleh, Jamal Salem, Khalid

Salem, Nada Salem, Saeed Salmeen, Riham
Mahmoud Samara, Halima Saeed Seemba,
Jalal Selo, Sarah Shabib, Shamma Shafee, Suad
Shamma, Ahmed Mohanned Sharief, Burhan
Shawi, Ramzy Shuhaiber, Marwa Mohammed
Soliman, Mohammed Mohammed Soliman,
Khalil Stas, Khalid Hasan Subaihi, Taryam

Hasan Subaihi, Razan Takash, Sidra Tariq,
Yusuf Thakur, Fatima Tokmafshan, Aznive
Tossounian, Annie Vahedipour, Antone Wakim Wakim, Layal Watfeh, Mohamed Youssef,
Iman Tahsin Zadeh, Ahmed Zain, Moustafa
Zakaria, Israa Magdi Zayed.
Yemen
2005
A New Day in Old Sanaa / Un jour nouveau
dans le vieux Sanaa (Bader Ben Hirsi)
2006
Amina (Khadija al-Salami) (documentary)

GDP: 9,732m
GDP per head: 448
Capital city: Sanaa (population: 2,008,000)
Chronology
Feature films:
2000
The English Sheikh and the Yemeni Gentleman
/ Le cheikh anglais et le gentleman ymnite
(Bader Ben Hirsi) (documentary)
Short Filmmakers
Saad Hassan al-Zubaidi, Naima Bachiri, Jamil
Nacer, Hamid Oqabi.
Part Three
Index of
Feature-Film Titles
1 + 1 / One Plus One (Youssef Maalouf, 1971,

Syria)
100 Percent / Miya ala miya (Khairiya alMansour, 1992, Iraq)
1948 (Mohamed Bakri, 1998, Palestine) documentary)
1958 (Ghassan Salhab, 2009, Lebanon) (documentary)
20/20 Vision / Sitta ala sitta (Khairiya alMansour, 1988, Iraq)
33 Days / 33 jours / 33 yaoum (Ma Masri,
2007, Palestine)
33 jours / 33 Days / 33 yaoum (Ma Masri,
2007, Palestine)
laube / At Dawn / Maa al-fajr (Abdel Jabar
al-Obeidi, 1964, Iraq)
la fin de lt / At the End of Summer /
Akher as saif (Marwan and Ghadi Rahbani, 1980, Lebanon)
la recherche de la princesse Layla / Looking
for Princess Leila / al-Baath ... an Layla
al-amiriyyah (Qassim Hawal, 1992, Iraq)
travers la poussire / Crossing the Dust /
Parinawa la ghobar (Shawkat Amin Korki,
2006, Iraq)
Abou Hella / Abu hila (Mohamed Choukri
Jamil and Youssuf Gergis, 1962, Iraq)
Abou Slim missaire damour / Abou Selim,
Messenger of Love (Youssef Maalouf, 1963,
Lebanon)
Abou Slim en Afrique / Abou Selim in Africa
/ Abou Slim fi Afriquia (Gary Garabdian,
1966, Lebanon)
Abou Slim en ville / Abou Selim in the City
(Hassib Chams, 1962, Lebanon)
Abou Selim in Africa / Abou Slim en Afrique
/ Abou Slim fi Afriquia (Gary Garabdian,
1966, Lebanon)
Abou Selim in the City / Abou Slim en ville

(Hassib Chams, 1962, Lebanon)
Abou Selim, Messenger of Love / Abou Slim
missaire damour (Youssef Maalouf, 1963,
Lebanon)
Absence (Mohamed Souweid, 1981, Lebanon)
Adieu au pass / Farewell to the Past (Mohamed Shahin, 1978, Syria)
Adieu Gary / Goodbye Gary (Nassim Amrouche, 2009, Jordan)
Adieu Liban / Farewell O Lebanon / (Kikmat Labib, 1967, Iraq)
Adventurers, The / Les aventuriers / alMoughamiron (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1981,
Lebanon)
Affair, The / Laffaire / al-Safaka (Samir alGhoussayni, 1982, Lebanon)
Afra and Bader / Afra et Bader / Afra wa
Bader (Faleh al-Zedi, 1963, Iraq)
Afra et Bader / Afra and Bader / Afra wa
Bader (Faleh al-Zedi, 1963, Iraq)
After the War ... / Aprs la guerre cest
toujours la guerre (Samir Abdallah, 2008,
Lebanon) (documentary)
Agitators, The / Les fauteurs (Mohamed Shahin, 1975, Syria)
Aime de tous / Loved by All / Habitat al-kol
(Rida Myassar, 1964, Lebanon)
Al-Ahrar Bridge, The / Le pont dal-Ahrar / Jisr
al-ahrar (Dia al-Bayati, 1970, Iraq)
Alia and Issa / Alia et Issa / Alya wa Issa (Andr Chotin, 1948, Iraq)
Alia et Issa / Alia and Issa / Alya wa Issa (Andr Chotin, 1948, Iraq)
Al-Lajat (Riyad Shayya, 1995, Syria)
All My Mothers / Toutes mes mres / Hameye madrana-e man (Ebrahim Saeedi and
Zahavi Sanjavi, 2009, Iraq) (documentary)
Al-Mahabba (Dureid Lahham, 1990, Syria)
162
Al-Marmoura (Wiam al-Saidi, 1985, Lebanon)

Al-Mouzayafa (Soubhi Seifeddine, 1983,
Lebanon)
Al-Mureed (Nujoom al-Ghanem, 2008,
United Arab Emirates)
Al-Tharwa al-samakia (Wadeih Yousef, 1976,
Syria)
Al-Yazirli (Qays al-Zubaydi, 1974, Syria)
Amani sous larc en ciel / Amani Under the
Rainbow (Samir Khoury, 1984, Lebanon)
Amani Under the Rainbow / Amani sous larc
en ciel (Samir Khoury, 1984, Lebanon)
Amerrika / Amreeka (Cherien Dabis, 2009,
Palestine)
Amina (Khadija al-Salami, 2006, Yemen)
(documentary)
Amour Constantinople / Love in Constantinople (Seif-Eddine Chawkat, 1967, Syria)
Amour denfants / Childish Love (Fares Khalil,
2008, Lebanon)
Another Day / Un autre jour / Yawm akhar
(Sahib Haddad, 1978, Iraq)
Another Facet of Love / Une autre facette de
lamour / Wahj akhar lil-hob (Mohamed
Shahin, 1972, Syria)
Appartement de lamour / Flat for Love (Nagdi
Hafez, 1973, Syria)
Aprs la guerre cest toujours la guerre / After
the War ... (Samir Abdallah, 2008, Lebanon) (documentary)
Arab Falcon, The / Le faucon des arabes / Sakr
al-arab (Rida Myassar, 1966, Lebanon)
Arnas Children / Les enfants dArna / Atfal
Arna (Juliano Mer-Khamis, 2003, Palestine) (documentary)
rose / al Beitt al-zahr (Joana Hadjithomas
and Khalil Joreige, 1999, Lebanon)
Arrivals from the Sea / Les arrivants par la
mer (Seif-Eddine Chawkat, 1977, Syria)
At Dawn / laube / Maa al-fajr (Abdel Jabar
al-Obeidi, 1964, Iraq)
At Our Listeners Request / Au plaisir des
auditeurs / Ma yatlubuhu al-mustamiun
(Abdellatif Abdelhamid, 2003, Iraq)
At the End of Summer / la fin de lt /
Akher as saif (Marwan and Ghadi Rahbani, 1980, Lebanon)
At the Mercy of the Winds / Au gr des vents

/ Fi mahab al-rih (Zinardi Habis, 1986,
Lebanon)
Ayyam al-loulou (Wiam al-Saidi, 1986,
Lebanon)
Attachment, The / Lattachement / Al-mahabba (Doureid Lahham, 1990, Syria)
Attempt, The / Lessai a.k.a. Lexprience / alTajruba (Fouad al-Tuhami, 1977, Iraq)
Attente / Waiting / Intizar (Rashid
Masharawi, 2006, Palestine)
Au gr des vents / At the Mercy of the Winds
/ Fi mahab al-rih (Zinardi Habis, 1986,
Lebanon)
Au neuvime mois / In the Ninth Month / Fishah al-tasi (Ali Nasser, 2002, Palestine)
Au plaisir des auditeurs / At Our Listeners
Request / Ma yatlubuhu al-mustamiun
(Abdellatif Abdelhamid, 2003, Iraq)
Au secours / Help (Marc Abi Rached, 2009,
Lebanon)
Au service de lamour / In the Service of Love
/ Bi amr al-hub (Mohamed Selmane, 1965,
Lebanon)
Au temps des perles / At the time of Pearls /
Ayyam al-loulou (Wiam al-Saidi, 1986,
Lebanon)
Au-del des frontires / Beyond the Borders /
Wara al-hudud (Zuhayr al-Shawwa, 1963,
Syria)
Aujourdhui / Today (Akram Zaatari, 2003,
Lebanon)
Autour de la maison rose / Around the Pink
House / al Beit al-zahr (Joana Hadjithomas
Autumn Leaves / Feuilles dautomne / Awrak
al-kharif (Hikmet Labib, 1963, Iraq)
Ayez piti de moi / Take Pity on Me / Irhamoini (Hyder al-Omer, 1958, Iraq)
Ayroum (Nigol Bezjian, 2005, Lebanon)
Babylon II (Samir, 1983, Iraq)
Baghdad Nights / Les nuits de Bagdad / Layali
Bagdad (Borhan al-Din Jassem, 1975, Iraq)
Baghdad On/Off (Saad Salman, 2002, Iraq)
Bahraini Tale / Un conte de Bahrain / Hekaya
Bahrainiya (Bassam al-Thawadi, 2008,
Bahrain)

Bank, The / La banque / al-Bank (Mohamed
Selmane, 1965, Lebanon)
saa daach (William Saimon, 1964, Iraq)
Basrah 11 heures / Basra 11 Oclock / Basrah
saa daach (William Saimon, 1964, Iraq)
Battle in the Desert / Combat dans le dsert
(Mohamed Selmane, 1974, Syria)
Battle of Al-Qdissiya, The / La bataille dAlQdissiya / al-Qdissiya (Salah Abou Seif,
1981, Iraq)
Beach of Love, The / La plage de lamour /
Chat al-hob (Antoine Remy, 1974, Lebanon)
Beautiful Girl and the Tiger, The / La beaut
et le tigre / al-Hassnawal nemr (Mohamed
Beautiful Shepherdess, The / La belle bergre
(Atef Salem, 1972, Syria)
Beauty and Some Giants, A / Une belle et des
gants / Hassnaa wa amalika (Samir alGhoussayni, 1980, Lebanon)
Beauty and the Four Looks, The / La belle et
les quatre regards (Seif-Eddine Chawkat,
1975, Syria)
Because of Circumstances / En raison de
circonstances (Saad Salman, 1982, Iraq)
(documentary)
Bedouin Girl in Paris, A / Une bdouine
Paris / Badawia fi Baris (Mohamed Selmane, 1964, Lebanon)
Bedouin Girl in Rome, A / Une bdouine
Rome / Badawia fi Roma (Mohamed Selmane, 1965, Lebanon)
Beirut 011 / Beyrouth 011 / Beyrouth sifr
hdaache (Antoine Remy, 1967, Lebanon)
Beirut between New York and Baghdad /
Beyrouth entre New York et Bagdad (Dalia
Fathallah, 2005, Lebanon) (documentary)
Beyrouth Beyrouth / Beirut Oh Beirut /
Beirut ya Beirut (Maroun Bagdadi, 1975,
Lebanon)
Beirut Open City / Beyrouth ville ouverte
(Samir Habchi, 2007, Lebanon)
Beirut, Phantoms / Beyrouth, ville fantme
/ Ashbah Beirut (Ghassan Salhab, 1998,
Lebanon)
Beirut, the Meeting / Beyrouth, la rencontre /
Beyrouth, el lika (Borhan Alawaya, 1981,
Lebanon)
163
Bells of Return, The / Les cloches du retour
/ Ajrass al-awda (Taysir Abboud, 1969,
Lebanon)
Belt of Fire / Ceinture de feu / Zinnar al-nar
(Bahij Hojeij, 2003, Lebanon)
Best Days of My Life, The / Les plus beaux
jours de ma vie (Henri Barakat, 1973,
Lebanon)
Bewilderment / Lgarement / al-Dayae (Mohamed Selmane, 1971, Lebanon)
Beyond Our Dreams / Passeurs de rve (Hiner
Saleem, 1999, Iraq)
Beyond the Borders / Au-del des frontires /
Wara al-hudud (Zuhayr al-Shawwa, 1963,
Syria)
Beyrouth 011 / Beirut 011 / Beyrouth sifr
hdaache (Antoine Remy, 1967, Lebanon)
Beyrouth entre New York et Bagdad / Beirut
between New York and Baghdad (Dalia
Fathallah, 2005, Lebanon) (documentary)
Beirut Oh Beirut / Beyrouth Beyrouth /
Beirut ya Beirut (Maroun Bagdadi, 1975,
Lebanon)
Beyrouth ville ouverte / Beirut Open City
(Samir Habchi, 2007, Lebanon)
Beyrouth, la rencontre / Beirut, the Encounter
/ Beyrouth, al-lika (Borhan Alawaya, 1981,
Lebanon)
Beyrouth, ville fantme / Beirut Phantoms
/ Ashbah Beirut (Ghassan Salhab, 1998,
Lebanon)
Biches / Does / Ghezlane (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1976, Lebanon)
Bienvenue lamour / Welcome to Love (Mohamed Selmane, 1968, Lebanon)
Big Question, The a.k.a. Clash of Loyalties /
(Mohamed Choukri Jamil, 1983, Iraq)
Birth of the Prophet / Naissance du prophte
/ Mawled al-rassoul (Ahmed al-Toukhi,
1960, Lebanon)
Bitter Honey / Le miel amer / al-Assal al-morr
Bitter Water / Eau amre (Maysoon Pachachi,
2003, Iraq) (documentary)
Black Flour / La farine noire / al-Tahin alaswad (Ghassan Shmeit, 2001, Syria)
Black Jaguar, The / Le jaguar noir / al-Jaguar
al-sawda (Mohamed Selmane, 1965,
Lebanon)
164
Boat, The / La barque / al-Zawraq (collective,

1977, Iraq)
Body on Fire / Le corps en feu / Lahib al-jassad
Bonjour lamour / Hello, Love / Marhabane
ayouhal hub (Mohamed Selmane, 1962,
Lebanon)
Bonne nuit / Good Night (Khaldoun alMahled, 1975, Syria)
Borders / Les frontires / al-Hudud (Dureid
Lahham, 1984, Syria)
Borders in Flames / Frontires en flammes
/ Hudud al-mulahihah (Sahib Haddad,
1986, Iraq)
Breeze of the Soul / Le souffle de lme / Nassim ar-ruh (Abdellatif Abdelhamid, 1999,
Syria)
Bride from Kurdistan, The / La marie du
Kurdistan / Arusat Kurdistan (Jafar Ali,
1992, Iraq)
Bride of the Euphrates, The / La marie de
lEuphrate / Aros al-forat (Abdel Hadi
Mobarak, 1961, Iraq)
Bridge of the Wicked / Le Pont des mchants
(Nagdi Hafez, 1971, Syria)
Broken Wings, The / Les ailes brises / alAjniha al-mutakassira (Youssef Maalouf,
1964, Lebanon)
(Ahmed al-Toukhi, 1960, Lebanon)
Bus, The / Lautobus / Bosta (Philippe
Aractingi, 2005, Lebanon)
Bus Driver, The / Le contrleur dautobus / alJabi (Jafar Ali, 1969, Iraq)
Cairo-Baghdad / Le Caire-Bagdad / Al-Kahira-Bagdad (Ahmed Badrakhan, 1945, Iraq)
Call of Duty, The / Lappel du devoir / Nadaalwajih (Ayyub Badry, 1937, Syria
Canticle of Stones / Cantique de pierre /
Nashid al-hajjar (Michel Khleifi, 1989,
Palestine)
Canticles of Love / Cantiques damour /
Alhane al-hub (Mohamed Selmane, 1967,
Lebanon)
Cantique de pierre / Canticle of Stones /
Nashid al-hajjar (Michel Khleifi, 1989,
Palestine)
Cantiques damour / Canticles of Love /
Alhane al-hub (Mohamed Selmane, 1967,
Lebanon)
Captain Abu Raed / Le capitaine Abu Raed

(Amin Matalqa, 2007, Jordan)
Captive, The / La captive / al-Asira (Samir alGhoussayni, 1973, Lebanon)
Ceinture de feu / Circle of Fire / Zinnar al-nar
(Bahij Hojej, 2003, Lebanon)
Celebration, The / La fte (Bashir Safia, 1974,
Syria)
Cent visages pour un seul jour / A Hundred
Faces for a Single Day / Miat wajh li yom
wahed (Christian Ghazi, 1972, Lebanon)
Chahin / Shhn (Khalid al-Siddick, 1985,
Kuwait)
Chambre No. 7 / Room No. 7 / Gorfa raqm
sabaa (Kameran Hassani, 1964, Iraq)
Charbel (Nicolas Abou Samah, 1966, Lebanon)
Chazhra la bdouine / Chazhra the Bedouin
/ Chazhra al-badawia (Borhan Jassem alImam, 1962, Iraq)
Chazhra the Bedouin / Chazhra la bdouine
/ Chazhra al-badawia (Borhan Jassem alImam, 1962, Iraq)
Chemin des rves / The Path of Dreams /
Rariq al-ahlam (Harry Sarkassian, 1973,
Lebanon)
Cherwale and Mini-Skirt / Cherwale et
mini-jupe / Cherwale wa mini-jupe (Samir
al-Ghoussayni, 1973, Lebanon)
Cherwale et mini-jupe / Cherwale and MiniSkirt / Cherwale wa mini-jupe (Samir
Childish Love / Amour denfants (Fares Khalil,
2008, Lebanon)
Children of Palestine, The / Les enfants de
Palestine / Affl Filasyn (Samir Nasr, 1977,
Palestine)
Chipies / The Shrews / Banat akker zamane
Chouchou and the Million / Chouchou et le
Million / Chouchou wal milion (Antoine
Remy, 1963, Lebanon)
Chouchou et le Million / Chouchou and the
Million / Chouchou wal milion (Antoine
Remy, 1963, Lebanon)
Chouchous Adventures / Les aventures de
Chouchou / Moughamarat Chouchou (Mohamed Selmane, 1966, Lebanon)
Chronicle of a Disappearance / Chronique
dune disparition / Sijil ikhtifa (Elia Suleiman, 1996, Palestine)

(Samir Zikra, 1986, Syria)
Chronique dune disparition / Chronicle of a
Disappearance / Sijil ikhtifa (Elia Suleiman, 1996, Palestine)
Chronique de lanne prochaine / Chronicle of
the Coming Year / Waqai alam al-muqbil
(Samir Zikra, 1986, Syria)
Circle of Fire / Ceinture de feu (Bahij Hojej,
2003, Lebanon)
City Dreams / Les rves de la ville / Ahlam alMadina (Mohamed Malas, 1984, Syria)
City Rose, A / Une rose de la ville / Zahratun
min al-madina (Mohamed Shahin, 1964,
Syria)
Civil War / Guerre civile (Mohamed Souweid,
2002, Lebanon)
Civilised, The / Civilises / al-Mutahaddirat
(Randa Chahal-Sabbag, 1999, Lebanon)
Civilises / The Civilised / al-Mutahaddirat
(Randa Chahal-Sabbag, 1999, Lebanon)
Clash of Loyalties a.k.a. The Big Question /
Cloud / Nuage / Sahb (Mohamed Shahin,
1991, Syria)
Combat Djrash / The Struggle in Jarash /
Siraa fi Jarash (Ibrahim Hassan Sirhan,
1958, Jordan)
Combat dans le dsert / Battle in the Desert
(Mohamed Selmane, 1974, Syria)
Conqurant de lespace / Conqueror of Space
(Sokheie Kawaan, 1975, Syria)
Conqueror of Space / Conqurant de lespace
(Sokheie Kawaan, 1975, Syria)
Conquerors, The / Les conqurants / al-Kahiroun (Frank Agrama, 1966. Lebanon)
Conte des trois diamants / The Tale of the
Three Jewels / Hikayat al-jawaher al-thalatha (Michel Khleifi, 1996, Palestine)
Cops, The / Les flics (Josef Fars, 2003, Lebanon)
Country Above Wounds, A / Un pays, les
plaies, un dplacement / Watan fawq aljirah (Soubhi Seifeddine, 1983, Lebanon)
Coupure / Cut (Nizzar Hassan 2000, Palestine)
Couvre-feu / Curfew / Hatta isaar akhar
(Rashid Masharawi, 1993, Palestine)
165
Crisis of the Young, The / La crise des jeunes
Crossing, The / La traverse / al-Ekhtiraq
(Kanam Kanam, 1974, Syria)
Crossing the Dust / travers la poussire /
Parinawa la ghobar (Shawkat Amin Korki,
2006, Iraq)
Cruel Sea, The / La mer cruelle / Basya bahr
(Khalid al-Siddick, 1972, Kuwait)
Cruel Woman / Femme cruelle (Mohamed
Cry, The / Le cri / al-Sarkha (Fouad Charafeddine, 1991, Lebanon)
Curfew / Couvre-feu / Hatta isaar akhar
(Rashid Masharawi, 1993, Palestine)
Cut / Coupure (Nizzar Hassan 2000, Palestine)
Dans les champs de bataille / In the Battlefields / Maarik hob (Danielle Arbid, 2004,
Lebanon)
Dans les ruines de Baalbeck / In the Ruins of
Baalbeck / Bayn hayakel Baalbeck (Julio De Luca and Karam Boustany, 1933,
Lebanon)
Darbat al-wade (Wiam al-Saidi, 1963, Lebanon)
Dawn, The / Laube / Al-Boom (Khalid alZadjali, 2006, Oman)
Dawn of the World / Laube du monde (Abbas
Fahdel, 2007, Iraq)
Days in London / Des jours Londres / Ayyam
fi London (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1977,
Lebanon)
Days of Boredom / Jours dennui / Ayyam aldajar (Abdellatif Abdelhamid, 2008, Syria)
Days of My Life / Jours de ma vie / Ayyam min
omri (Georges Kahi, 1959, Lebanon)
Deadly Necklace, The / Le collier meutrier /
al-Akd al-katel (Ibrahim Takkouche, 1960,
Lebanon)
Death Leap, The / Le saut de la mort / Kafzat
al-mawt (Youssef Charafeddine, 1982,
Lebanon)
Decision, The / La dcision / al-Karar (Youssef
Charafeddine, 1981, Lebanon)
Depuis que tu nes plus l / Since You Left /
Min youm ma ruhat (Mohamed Bakri,
2006, Palestine) (documentary)
Des annes / Years / Sinine (Georges Kahi,
1962, Lebanon)
166
Des aventures comiques au Mexique / Mexico

Trip (Seif-Eddine Chawkat, 1972, Syria)
Des filles aimer / Girls to Love / Banat lil hob
Des fils sous le sable / Threads Beneath the
Sands / Khyoot taht al rimal (Khalifa alMeraikly, 2006, Qatar)
Des hros et des femmes / Heroes and Women
/ Abtal wa nissa (Mohamed Selmane, 1969,
Lebanon)
Des hommes sous le soleil / Men Under the
Sun / Rijalun tahta ash-shams (Nabil alMaleh, Mohamed Shahin and Mohamed
Muwaddin, 1970, Syria)
Des jours Londres / Days in London / Ayyam
fi London (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1977,
Lebanon)
Des mots de lamour / Words of Love / Kalam
fi hub (Mohamed Selmane, with Sayed
Tantawi, 1973, Lebanon)
Des ombres sur lautre rive / Shadows on the
Other Bank / Dill al al-jnibi al-khar
(Ghalib Shaath, 1973, Palestine)
Deux curs, un corps / Two Hearts, One Body
(Georges Kahi, 1959, Lebanon)
Deux lunes et un olivier / Two Moons and an
Olive Tree / Qamarn wa zayrunah (Abdellatif Abdelhamid, 2001, Syria).
Devils Cart, The / La charrette du diable /
Arabat al-chaitane (Georges Kahi, 1962,
Lebanon)
Direction oppose / The Wrong Way / al-Ittijh
al-mukis (Marwan Haddad, 1975, Syria)
Displacement, The / Le dplacement / al-Terhal (Raymond Boutros, 1997, Syria)
Divine Intervention / Intervention divine /
Yadun Ilahiyya (Elia Suleiman, 2002,
Palestine)
Do Not Touch My Wife / Ne touche pas ma
femme / Idak an mrati (Rida Myassar,
1967, Lebanon)
Docteur Hassan / Doctor Hassan / Doctor
Hassan (Mohamed Monir al-Yasen, 1958,
Iraq)
Doctor Hassan / Docteur Hassan / Doctor
Hassan (Mohamed Monir al-Yasen, 1958,
Iraq)
Does / Biches / Ghezlane (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1976, Lebanon)
Dont Say Goodbye to a Day Thats Scarcely

Gone / Ne dites pas adieu un jour qui na
gure pass / La taqIuli wadan lil ams
(Mohamed Shahin, 1977, Syria)
Doux comme un baie, mon amour / Sweet Like
a Berry, My Love / Habibati ya hab al-tout
(Marwan Haddad, 1979, Syria)
Drama of a Girl from the East, The / Le
drame dune fille de lorient / Maasat fatt
sharqiya (Mohamed Shahin, 1983, Syria)
Dream, A (Hani Shaibani, 2005, United
Arab Emirates)
Dreams / Rves / Ahlaam (Mohamed al-Daradji, 2005, Iraq)
Dreams of Sparrows, The / Rves de moineaux
(Hayder Mousa Daffar, 2005, Iraq) (documentary)
Dreamy Visions / Visions chimriques / Raa
halima (Waha al-Raheb, 2003, Syria)
Dunia (Jocelyne Saab, 2005, Lebanon)
Duped, The / Les dupes / al-Makhdhououn
(Tewfiq Saleh, 1972, Syria)
Eau amre / Bitter Water (Maysoon Pachachi,
crans de sable / Screens of Sand (Randa
Chahal-Sabbag, 1991, Lebanon)
crivains des frontires / Writers on the
Borders, a Journey to Palestine (Samir
Abdalah and Jose Reynes, 2004, Palestine)
(documentary)
En perdant Ahmad / Losing Ahmad (Abdullah
Boushahri, 2006, Kuwait) (documentary)
En raison de circonstances / Because of
Circumstances (Saad Salman, 1982, Iraq)
(documentary)
Encore une fois / Once More / Mara okhra
(Joud Saeed, 2009, Syria)
English Sheikh and the Yemeni Gentleman,
The / Le cheikh anglais et le gentleman
ymnite (Bader Ben Hirsi, 2000, Yemen)
(documentary)
Enqute personnelle / Personal Inquiry (Ula
Tabari, 2002, Palestine)
toiles du jour / Stars in Broad Daylight /
Nujum al-nahar (Oussama Mohammad,
1988, Syria)
Everyday Life in a Syrian Village / La vie
quotidien dans un village syrien / Al-hayat

al-yawmiya fi qaria Suriya (Omar Amiralay, 1974, Syria) (documentary)
Explosion, The / Lexplosion / al-Infijar (Rafic
Hajjar, 1982, Lebanon)
Extras, The / Les figurants / al-Kombars (Nabil
al-Maleh, 1993, Syria)
Fadous and the Hitchhiker / Fadous et
lautostoppeuse (Samir al-Ghoussayni,
1989, Lebanon)
Fadous et lautostoppeuse / Fadous and the
Hitchhiker / (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1989,
Lebanon)
Falafel (Michel Kammoun, 2006, Lebanon)
Falling from Earth / Tomber de la terre / Waala el-ard el-samaa (Chadi Zeneddine,
2007, Lebanon)
Farewell O Lebanon / Adieu Liban (Kikmat
Labib, 1967, Iraq)
Farewell to the Past / Adieu au pass (Mohamed Shahin, 1978, Syria)
Fate / Le destin / al-Kadar (Mounir Maasri,
1972, Lebanon)
Femme cruelle / Cruel Woman (Mohamed
Shahin, 1973)
Femme de feu / Fire Woman / Imraa min nar
Femmes dhiver / Winter Women / Nisaa lil
chitaa (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1974, Lebanon)
Femmes nues sans pch / Women Naked
without Sin (Koshav, 1967, Syria)
Fertile Memory / La mmoire fertile / Aldhkira al-khisba (Michel Khleifi, 1980,
Palestine)
Feuilles dautomne / Autumn Leaves / Awrak
al-kharif (Hikmet Labib, 1963, Iraq)
Fifth Arm of the Prison, The / La cinquime
citadelle / al-Qala al-khmisa (Bilal alSabouni, 1979, Syria)
Fifth Column, The / La cinquime colonne / alJiha al-khamisa (Soubhi Seifeddine, 1984,
Lebanon)
Fifth Chamber Ouija, The / La cinquime
chambre dOuija (Maher al-Khaja, 2009,
Filet de poisson / Fish Filet / Samak bila hassak (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1977, Lebanon)
Fils de Babylone / Son of Babylon / Ibn Babil
(Mohamed al-Daradji, 2009, Iraq)
167
Fire Woman / Femme de feu / Imraa min nar
First Song, The / Le premier chant / al-Lahn
al-awal (Mohamed Selmane, 1957, Lebanon)
Fish Filet / Filet de poisson / Samak bila hassak (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1977, Lebanon)
Fitna and Hassan / Fitna et Hassan / Fitna wa
Hassan (Hyder al-Omer, 1950, Iraq)
Fitna et Hassan / Fitna and Hassan / Fitna wa
Hassan (Hyder al-Omer, 1950, Iraq)
Five Master Singers, The / Les cinq matres
chanteurs (Nagdi Hafez, 1974, Syria)
Flat for Love / Appartement de lamour (Nagdi
Hafez, 1973, Syria)
Flat No. 13 / Limmeuble No. 13 / Imara rakm
13 (Sahib Haddad, 1986, Iraq)
Fleurs rouges / Red Flowers / Zouhour hamra
(Michel Haroun, 1957, Lebanon)
Flower Seller, The / La vendeuse de fleurs /
Bayyaat al-ward (Ali al-Ariss, 1943, Lebanon)
For the Homeland / Pour la patrie / Min ajl
al-watan (Fawzi al-Janabi, 1962, Iraq)
For Whoever Sings of Love / Pour qui chante
lamour / Liman youghanni al-hub (Wiam
al-Saidi, 1991, Lebanon)
For Whom the Sun Rises / Pour qui se lve le
soleil / Liman tachrok al-chams (Joseph
Fahdi, 1958, Lebanon)
For Women Only / Pour femmes seulement
/ Lil nisaa fakat (Antoine Remy, 1966,
Lebanon)
For You, Oh Palestine / Pour toi Palestine /
Fidaki ya Phalestine (Antoine Remy, 1969,
Lebanon)
Forbidden Love / Lamour interdit (Khadel
Hamadeh, 1977, Syria)
Forced Marriage, A / Un mariage forc (Rida
Myassar,1973, Syria)
Ford Transit (Hany Abu Assad, 2002, Palestine) (documentary)
Forget Baghdad: Jews and ArabsThe Iraqi
Connection / Oublie Bagdad: Juifs et
Arabesla connection irakienne (Samir,
2002, Iraq)
Forgive Me, My Love / Pardonne-moi mon
amour / Samehni habibi (Taysir Abboud,
1981, Lebanon)
168
Four Girls / Quatre filles (Hassan al-Halibi,

2008, Bahrain)
Fourteenth Chick, The / Le quatorzime poussin / Het veertiende kippetje (Hany Abu
Assad, 1998, Palestine)
Fragile Houses / Maisons fragiles / Bouyout
min warak (Rafic Hajjar, 1984, Lebanon)
Fragments dimages / Fragments of Images
/ Baqaya suwar (Nabil al-Maleh, 1980,
Syria)
Fragments of Images / Fragments dimages
/ Baqaya suwar (Nabil al-Maleh, 1980,
Syria)
Freedom Fighters, The / Les fdayins / al-Fi
daiyyoun (Christian Ghazi, 1967, Lebanon)
Freedom Gang, The / Le gang de la libert / alSheikha (Layla Assaf, 1994 Lebanon)
Frontires en flammes / Borders in Flames
/ Hudud al-mulahihah (Sahib Haddad,
1986, Iraq)
Goodbye Gary / Adieu Gary (Nassim Amrouche, 2009, Jordan)

Grand Prix / Grand prix / al-Jaiza al koubra
(Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1974, Lebanon)
Grand prix / Grand Prix / al-Jaiza al koubra
Greedy Ones, The / Les gourmands a.k.a. Les
algues deau douce / al-Tahalib (Raymond
Boutros, 1991, Syria)
Green Valley, The / La valle verte / al-Wadi
al-akhdar (Zuharyr al-Shawwa, 1950,
Syria)
Guerre, amour, dieu, et folie / War, Love, God
and Madness (Mohamed al-Daradji, 2009,
Iraq) (documentary)
Guerre civile / Civil War (Mohamed Souweid,
2002, Lebanon)
Gypsy in Love, The / La gitane amoureuse /
al-Ghajaria al-achika (Rida Myassar, 1972,
Lebanon)
Game of Love and Death, The / Le jeu de

lamour et de la mort / Lubatu al-hubb was
al-gatl (Mohamed Shahin, 1983, Syria)
Garo / Garo (Gary Garabdian, 1965, Lebanon)
Gate of Heaven / La porte au ciel / Bawabet
al-janna (Maher Kaddo, 2009, Syria)
Gazala (Safa Mohamed Ali, 1967, Iraq)
Ghawars Empire (Bashir Safia, 1982, Syria)
Ghost from the Past, The / Le fantme du pass
/ Chabah almadi (Georges Ghayad, 1984,
Lebanon)
Gibier de valeur / Valuable Game / al-Istiyad
al-kabir (Rida Myassar, 1974, Lebanon)
Gipsy and the Heroes, The / La gitane et les
hros / al-Ghajaria wal abtal (Samir alGhoussayni, 1985, Lebanon)
Girl from the Air, The / La fille de lair (Maroun Bagdadi, 1992, Lebanon)
Girls to Love / Des filles aimer / Banat lil hob
Golden Sands / Sables dor / Rimal min thaheb
(Youssef Chahine, 1967, Lebanon)
Good Night / Bonne nuit (Khaldoun alMahled, 1975, Syria)
Good Omen, The / Le bon augure / Chaif Khir
Haifa / Haifa (Rashid Masharawi, 1996,

Palestine)
Half-Metre Incident, The / Laccident du demimtre / Hadithat al-nisf mitr (Samir Zikra,
1983, Syria)
Hamad and Hammud / Hamad et Hammud /
Hamad wa Hammud (Ibrahim Jalal, 1980,
Iraq)
Hamad et Hammud / Hamad and Hammud /
Hamad wa Hammud (Ibrahim Jalal, 1980,
Iraq)
Hamidous Return / Le retour dHamidou /
Awdat Hamidu (Fayal al-Yassiri, 1974,
Iraq)
Hand of Fate, The / La main du destin / Yad
al-qadar (Kamel al-Obeidi, 1965, Iraq)
Hand, The / La main / al-Yad (Qassim Hawal,
1970, Syria)
Haneen (Mohamed al-Traifi, 2006, Emirati)
Hasiba (Raymond Boutros, 2008, Syria)
H! Noublie pas le cumin / Hey! Dont Forget
the Cumin (Hala al-Abdulla Yacoub, 2008,
Syria) (documentary)
Head, The / La tte / al-Ras (Fayal al-Yasseri,
1976, Iraq)
Hello, Love / Bonjour lamour / Marhabane
ayouhal hub (Mohamed Selmane, 1962,
Lebanon)

Help / Au secours (Marc Abi Rached, 2009,
Lebanon)
Henna (Saleh Karama, 2008, United Arab
Emirates)
Heros Return, The / Le retour du hros / Awdat al-batal (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1983,
Lebanon)
Heros Storm Cloud, The / La nue du hros
(Marouan Akkachi, 1974, Syria)
Heroes and Women / Des hros et des femmes
/ Abtal wa nissa (Mohamed Selmane, 1969,
Lebanon)
deux fois / al-Abtal yuadun marrayayn
(Salah Dehny, 1977, Syria)
Heroic Airforce Formations, The / Les
hroiques formations ariennes / Kharq elakhtr (Marouan Alkawey, 1974, Syria)
Hey! Dont Forget the Cumin / H! Noublie
pas le cumin (Hala al-Abdulla Yacoub,
2008, Syria) (documentary)
Histoire damour / A Love Story / Hikayat
gharam (Mohamed Selmane, 1963, Lebanon)
Histoire dun retour / The Story of a Return
/ An al-awan (Jean-Claude Codsi, 1994,
Lebanon)
Histoire dun rve / Story of a Dream / Tarick
hulm (Nabil al-Maleh, 1983, Syria)
Hors la vie / Outside Life / Kharif al-hayat
(Maroun Bagdadi, 1990, Lebanon)
Hors rseau / Out of Coverage / Kahref altaghtiya (Abdellatif Abdelhamid, 2007,
Syria)
Horseman of Bani Abes, The / Le cavalier
de Bani Abes (Mohamed Selmane, 1977,
Syria)
Horsemen of Liberation, The / Les cavaliers de
la libration (Souheil Kanaan, 1974, Syria)
Htel des rves / Hotel of Dreams / Foundok
al-ahlam (Albert Naguib, 1966, Lebanon)
Hotel of Dreams / Htel des rves / Foundok
al-ahlam (Albert Naguib, 1966, Lebanon)
Hour of Struggle Has Sounded, Thethe
Struggle in Oman / Lheure de la libration
a sonn / Saat al-Tahrir dakkat ya Istimar
(Heiny Srour, 1974, Lebanon)
House, The / La maison / al-Bayt (Abdelhadi
al-Rawi, 1988, Iraq)
169
Houses in That Alley, The / Les maisons de
cette ruelle / Bitut fi dhalika al-zuqaq (Qassim Hawal, 1977, Iraq)
Hundred Faces for a Single Day, A / Cent visages pour un seul jour / Miat wajh li yom
wahed (Christian Ghazi, 1972, Lebanon)
I Am Antar / Je suis Antar / Ana Antar
(Youssef Maalouf, 1967, Lebanon)
I Am Iraq / Je suis lIrak / Ana al-Irak (Mohamed al-Din al-Yasen, 1960, Iraq)
I Am Not Guilty / Je ne suis pas coupable /
Lastou mouzniba (Ibrahim Takkouche,
1960, Lebanon)
I Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her
Grave / Je suis celle qui porte les fleurs vers
sa tombe (Hala al-Abdallah Yakoub and
Ammar al-Beik, 2006, Syria) (documentary)
I Want to See / Je veux voir (Joan Hadjithomas
I.D. / Vos papiers (Ghassan Shmeit, 2007,
Syria)
Idol of the Crowds, The / Lidole des foules /
Fatinat al-jamahir (Mohamed Selmane,
1964, Lebanon)
Idol of the Desert, The / Lidole du dsert /
Fatinat al-sahra (Mohamed Selmane,
1965, Lebanon)
If I Die Twice I Would Love You / Je meurs
deux fois je taimerais (Georges Khoury,
1975, Syria)
Iftarid nafsaka Saidan(Abdelhardi al-Rawi,
1990, Iraq)
Il tait une fois Beyrouth, histoire dune star /
Once upon a Time, Beirut a.k.a. The Story
of a Star / Kan ya ma kan Beirut a.k.a.
Qissah najmah (Jocelyne Saab, 1994,
Lebanon)
Il ne suffit pas que Dieu soit avec les pauvres
/ It Is Not Enough for God to Be with the
Poor / La yakfi an yakoun allah maal foukara (Borhan Alawiyya, 1978, Lebanon)
(documentary)
In the Battlefields / Dans le champs de bataille
/ Maarik hubb (Danielle Arbid, 2004,
Lebanon)
In the Ninth Month / Au neuvime mois / Fishah al-tasi (Ali Nasser, 2002, Palestine)
170
In the Ruins of Baalbeck / Dans les ruines de

Baalbeck / Bayn hayakel Baalbeck (Julio De Luca and Karam Boustany, 1933,
Lebanon)
In the Service of Love / Au service de lamour
/ Bi amr al-hub (Mohamed Selmane, 1965,
Lebanon)
Infidels, The / Les infidles (Randa Chahal
Sabbag, 1997, Lebanon)
Intervention divine / Divine Intervention /
Yadun Ilahiyya (Elia Suleiman, 2002,
Palestine)
Irak, le chant des absents / Iraq: The Song of
the Missing Men (Layth Abdulamir, 2005,
Iraq)
Iranian Journey / La femme-chauffeur, une
traverse en bus de lIran (Maysoon Pachachi, 1999, Iraq) (documentary)
Iraq: The Song of the Missing Men / Irak, le
chant des absents (Layth Abdulamir, 2005,
Iraq)
Island Devil, The / Le diable de lle / Chaitane al-jazira (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1981,
Lebanon)
It Is Not Enough for God to Be with the Poor
/ Il ne suffit pas que Dieu soit avec les
pauvres / La yakfi an yakoun allah maal
foukara (Borhan Alawiyya, 1978, Lebanon)
(documentary)
Jalla! Jalla! (Josef Fars, 2000, Lebanon)
James Bond, le jaloux / Jealous James Bond /
Ghawar James Bond (Nabil al-Maleh, 1974,
Syria)
Jasmine / Yasmin (Nizar Hassan, 1998, Palestine) (video)
Je meurs deux fois je taimerais / If I Die Twice
I Would Love You (Georges Khoury, 1975,
Syria)
Je ne suis pas coupable / I Am Not Guilty /
Lastou mouzniba (Ibrahim Takkouche,
1960, Lebanon)
Je suis Antar / I Am Antar / Ana Antar
(Youssef Maalouf, 1967, Lebanon)
Je suis celle qui porte les fleurs vers sa tombe
/ I Am the One Who Brings Flowers to
Her Grave (Hala al-Abdallah Yakoub and
Ammar al-Beik, 2006, 110', Syria) (documentary)
Je suis lIrak / I Am Iraq / Ana al-Irak (Mohamed al-Din al-Yasen, 1960, Iraq)
Je veux voir / I Want to See (Joan Hadjithomas
Jealous James Bond / James Bond, le jaloux /
Ghawar James Bond (Nabil al-Maleh, 1974,
Syria)
Jenin, Jenin / Jnine, Jnine (Mohamed Bakri,
Jnine, Jnine / Jenin, Jenin (Mohamed Bakri,
Jeremy Hardy vs. the Israeli Army (Leila Sansour, 2002, Palestine) (documentary)
Jesters Love, The / Lamour du bouffon /
Gharm al-muharrij (Bashir Safia, 1976,
Syria).
Jeunesse au soleil / Youth in the Sun / Chabab
tahtal cham (Samir Nasi, 1966, Lebanon)
Jiyan (Jano Rosebiani, 2002, Iraq)
Joies de la jeunesse / Joys of Youth / Afrah
al-chabab (Mohamed Selmane, 1964,
Lebanon)
Journey of Love / Voyage damour (Youssef
Maalouf, 1972, Syria)
Jours de ma vie / Days of My Life / Ayyam min
omri (Georges Kahi, 1959, Lebanon)
Jours dennui / Days of Boredom / Ayyam aldajar (Abdellatif Abdelhamid, 2008, Syria)
Joys of Youth / Joies de la jeunesse / Afrah
al-chabab (Mohamed Selmane, 1964,
Lebanon)
Judgement of Fate, The / Jugement du destin
/ Hokm al-kadar (Joseph Ghorayeb, 1959,
Lebanon)
Jugement du destin / The Judgement of Fate /
Hokm al-kadar (Joseph Ghorayeb, 1959,
Lebanon)
Jumaa and the Sea / Jumaa et la mer / Jumaa
wa al-bahr (Hani al-Shaibani, 2007, United
Arab Emirates)
Jumaa et la mer / Jumaa and the Sea / Jumaa
wa al-bahr (Hani al-Shaibani, 2007, United
Arab Emirates)
Jungle of Wolves, The / Le jungle des loups /
Ghbatu al-dib (Mohamed Shahin, 1977,
Syria)
Jusquau dclin du jour / Until the End of the
Day a.k.a. Nightfall (Mohamed Souweid,
2000, Lebanon) (documentary).

Kafr Kassem (Borhan Alawiya, 1974, Syria)
Kafrun (Dureid Lahham, 1991, Syria)
Karim Abou Chacra Does His Military Service
/ Karim Abou Chacra fait son service
militaire / Karim Abdou Chacra fi khidmat
al-alam (Fouad Joujou, 1994, Lebanon)
Karim Abou Chacra fait son service militaire
/ Karim Abou Chacra Does His Military
Service / Karim Abdou Chacra fi khidmat
al-alam (Fouad Joujou, 1994, Lebanon)
Kawkab, princesse du dsert / The Planet of
the Desert Princess / Kawbab amirat assahra (Ali al-Ariss, 1946, Lebanon)
Khalass (Borhan Alawiya, 2007, Lebanon)
Kidnapped / Le kidnapp / al-Makhtouf
(Fouad Joujou, 1983, Lebanon)
Kilometer Zero / Kilomtre zro (Hiner Saleem, 2005, Iraq)
Kilomtre zro / Kilometer Zero (Hiner Saleem, 2005, Iraq)
Kite, The / Le cerf-volant (Randa ChahalSabbag, 2003, Lebanon)
Knife, The / Le couteau / al-Sikkin (Khaled
Hamada, 1972, Syria)
Labri / The Shelter / al-Malja (Rafic Hajjar,
1980, Lebanon)
Laccident du demi-mtre / The Half-Metre Incident / Hadithat al-nisf mitr (Samir Zikra,
1983, Syria)
Laffaire / The Affair / al-Safaka (Samir alGhoussayni, 1982, Lebanon)
Lamant / The Lover / al-Ashiq (Mohamed
Munir Fanari, 1986, Iraq)
Lamour Bagdad / Love in Baghdad / alHubb fi Baghdad (Abdelhadi al-Rawi,
1986, Iraq)
Lamour Istamboul / Love in Istanbul /
Gharam fi Istambul (Tahsine Kawadri,
1966, Lebanon)
Lamour du bouffon / The Jesters Love /
Gharm al-muharrij (Bashir Safia, 1976,
Syria).
Lamour et karat / Love and Karat / Hubb
wa karati (Fayal al-Yassiri, 1973, Iraq)
Lamour interdit / Forbidden Love (Khadel
Hamadeh, 1977, Syria)
Lamour pour la vie / Love for Life / Hubbun
lil-hayt (Bashir Safia, 1981, Syria)
171
Lanniversaire de Laila / Lailas Birthday
(Rashid Mashawari, 2008, Palestine)
Lappel du devoir / The Call of Duty / Nadaalwajih (Ayyub Badry, 1937, Syria)
Lattachement / The Attachment / Al-mahabba
(Doureid Lahham, 1990, Syria)
Laube / The Dawn / Al-Boom (Khalid alZadjali, 2006, Oman)
Laube du monde / Dawn of the World (Abbas
Fahdel, 2007, Iraq)
Lautobus / The Bus / Bosta (Philippe
Aractingi, 2005, Lebanon)
Laventure du Mamelouk Jaber / The Mameluke Jabers Adventure / Mughamarat
al-Mamluk Jaber (Mohamed Shahin, 1974,
Syria)
Lgarement / Bewilderment / al-Dayae (Mohamed Selmane, 1971, Lebanon)
Lenjleuse / The Wheedler / al-Daloua (Mohamed Selmane, 1966, Lebanon)
Lessai a.k.a. Lexprience / The Attempt / alTajruba (Fouad al-Tuhami, 1977, Iraq)
Lt au Liban / Summer in Lebanon (Salah
Badrahkan, 1946, Lebanon)
Lexprience a.k.a. Lessai / The Attempt / alTajruba (Fouad al-Tuhami, 1977, Iraq)
Lexplosion / The Explosion / al-Infijar (Rafic
Hajjar, 1982, Lebanon)
Lheure de la libration a sonn / The Hour
of Struggle Has Soundedthe Struggle in
Oman / Saat al-Tahrir dakkat ya Istimar
(Heiny Srour, 1974, Lebanon)
Lhomme / The Man / al-Rajul (Fayal alYassiri, 1968, Iraq)
Lhomme voil / The Veiled Man / al-Rajul
al-muhajjah (Maroun Bagdadi, 1987,
Lebanon)
Lidole des foules / The Idol of the Crowds /
Fatinat al-jamahir (Mohamed Selmane,
1964, Lebanon)
Lidole du dsert / The Idol of the Desert / Fatinat al-sahra (Mohamed Selmane, 1965,
Lebanon)
Limmeuble No. 13 / Flat No. 13 / mara rakm
13 (Sahib Haddad, 1986, Iraq)
Lobstacle / The Obstacle / Al-hajiz (Bassam
al-Thawadi, 1990, Bahrain)
Loctobre vient / October Is Coming / Wa ja
tashrn (Wadeih Yousef, 1973, Syria)
172
Lil vigilant / The Vigilant Eye / al-Ayn alsahira (Gary Garabdian, 1963, Lebanon)
Lombre de labsence / Shadow of Absence /
Dhil al-gheyab (Nasri Hajjaj, 2008, Palestine) (documentary)
Lombre de la ville / The Shadows of the City
(Jean Chamoun, 2000, Lebanon)
Lordre du jour / Order of the Day (Michel
Khleifi, 1993, Palestine)
Lusurier / The Moneylender / al-Marabi (Mohamed Shahin, 1999, Syria)
La ballerine blesse / The Wounded Ballerina
/ Rqisa al al-firh (Mohamed Shahin,
1973, Syria)
La banque / The Bank / al-Bank (Mohamed
La barque / The Boat / al-Zawraq (collective,
1977, Iraq)
La bataille dAl-Qdissiya / The Battle of AlQdissiya / al-Qdissiya (Salah Abou Seif,
1981, Iraq)
La beaut et le tigre / The Beautiful Girl and
the Tiger / al-Hassnawal nemr (Mohamed
La belle bergre / The Beautiful Shepherdess
(Atef Salem, 1972, Syria)
La belle et les quatre regards / The Beauty
and the Four Looks (Seif-Eddine Chawkat,
1975, Syria)
La captive / The Captive / al-Asira (Samir alGhoussayni, 1973, Lebanon)
La charrette du diable / The Devils Cart /
Arabat al-chaitane (Georges Kahi, 1962,
Lebanon)
La chasse lhomme / Manhunt / Saydu alrijl (Bashir Safia, 1976, Syria)
La cinquime chambre dOuija / The Fifth
Chamber Ouija (Maher al-Khaja, 2009,
La cinquime citadelle / The Fifth Arm of the
Prison / al-Qala al-khmisa (Bilal al-Sabouni, 1979, Syria)
La cinquime colonne / The Fifth Column / alJiha al-khamisa (Soubhi Seifeddine, 1984,
Lebanon)
La crise des jeunes / The Crisis of the Young
La cueillette des olives / The Olive Harvest /
Mawsim al-zaytoon (Hanna Elias, 2002,
Palestine)
La dame aux lunes noires / The Lady with the

Dark Glasses / Saydat al-akmar as-sawda
(Samir Khoury, 1971, Lebanon)
La dame du palais / The Lady of the Palace /
Sayidat el-kasr (Samir Habchi, 2003, Lebanon) (documentary)
La dcision / The Decision / al-Karar (Youssef
La dernire dcision / The Last Decision /
Hobat al-madlum (Safa Mohamed Ali,
1961, Iraq)
La dernire nuit / The Last Night / al-Layl
al-akhir (Youssef Charafeddine, 1982,
Lebanon)
La farine noire / Black Flour / al-Tahin alaswad (Ghassan Shmeit, 2001, Syria)
La fte / The Celebration (Bashir Safia, 1974,
Syria)
La fille de lair / The Girl from the Air (Maroun Bagdadi, 1992, Lebanon)
La fille du gardien / The Watchmans Daughter / Bint al-hares (Henri Barakat, 1968,
Lebanon)
La folie des adolescentes / The Madness of
Adolescent Girls / Jounoun al- mourahikat
(Taysir Abboud, 1969, Lebanon)
La gitane amoureuse / The Gypsy in Love /
al-Ghajaria al-achika (Rida Myassar, 1972,
Lebanon)
La gitane et les hros / The Gipsy and the
Heroes / al-Ghajaria wal abtal (Samir alGhoussayni, 1985, Lebanon)
La grande question / Clash of Loyalties a.k.a.
The Big Question / al-Massala al-korba
La grenade et la myrrhe / Pomegranates and
Myrrh / Al-Mor wa al-rumman (Najwa
Najjar, 2008, Lebanon)
La guerre au Liban / The War in Lebanon /
Harb Lubnn (Samir Nasr, 1977, Palestine)
La guitare de lamour / Loves Guitar / Guitare
al-hub (Mohamed Selmane, 1973, Lebanon)
La honte / Shame / al-Ar (Bilal al-Sabouni,
Bashir Safia, and Wadeih Yousef, 1974,
Syria)
La honte, Restoum / Shame, Restoum / Ayb ya
Restoum (Wiam al-Saidi, 1987, Lebanon)

La jeunesse et la beaut / Youth and Beauty
/ al-Siba wal jamal (Mohamed Selmane,
1965, Lebanon)
La leon de la vie / Lifes Lesson / Ababathu alhayat (Mohamed al-Ansari, 1958, Iraq)
La longue nuit / The Long Night (Hatem Mohamed, 2009, Syria)
La lune et le soleil / The Moon and the Sun /
al-Qamar wash-shams (Ibrahim Hassan
Sirhan, 1957, Jordan)
La main / The Hand / al-Yad (Qassim Hawal,
1970, Syria)
La main du destin / The Hand of Fate / Yad alqadar (Kamel al-Obeidi, 1965, Iraq)
La maison / The House / al-Bayt (Abdelhadi
al-Rawi, 1988, Iraq)
La manigance des femmes / Womens Intrigue
/ Loubat al-nisaa (Samir al-Ghoussayni,
1982, Lebanon)
La marie de lEuphrate / The Bride of the
Euphrates / Aros al-forat (Abdel Hadi Mobarak, 1961, Iraq)
La marie du Kurdistan / The Bride from
Kurdistan / Arusat Kurdistan (Jafar Ali,
1992, Iraq)
La mmoire fertile / Fertile Memory / Aldhkira al-khisba (Michel Khleifi, 1980,
Palestine)
La mer cruelle / The Cruel Sea / Basya bahr
(Khalid al-Siddick, 1972, Kuwait)
La monte de la pluie / The Rising Rain / Suud
al-matar (Abdellatif Abdelhamid, 1996,
Syria)
La nourrice / The Wet Nurse / al-Mardaa (Ali
Nasser, 1993, Palestine)
La nue du hros / The Heros Storm Cloud
(Marouan Akkachi, 1974, Syria)
La nuit / The Night / al-Layl (Mohamed Malas, 1992, Syria)
La Palestine, chronique dun peuple / Palestine: A Peoples Record / Filstin, sjil sha
(Qays al-Zubaydi, 1984, Iraq) (documentary)
La Palestine en feu / Palestine on Fire / Filastin fi al-lahb (Samir Nimr, 1988, Palestine)
(documentary)
La Palestine aprs le 11 septembre / Palestine
Post-9/11 (Osama al-Zain, 2005, Palestine)
(documentary)
173
La plage de lamour / The Beach of Love / Chat al-hub (Antoine Remy, 1974, Lebanon)
La porte au ciel / Gate of Heaven / Bawabet
al-janna (Maher Kaddo, 2009, Syria)
La princesse et le fleuve / The Princess and the
River / al-Amira wal-Nahr (Fayal al-Yassiri, 1982, Iraq) (animated feature)
La rcompense / The Reward / Al-jaza (Hussen al-Samara, 1970, Iraq)
La reine de lamour / The Queen of Love /
Malikat al-hob (Romeo Lahoud, 1972,
Lebanon)
La route de Jrusalem / The Road to Jerusalem
/ al-Tarikila al-Qods (Abdel Wahab alHindi, 1969, Jordan)
La rue des rves / The Street of Dreams / Triq
al-Ahlam (Harri Sarkisian, inLebanon,
1973, Iraq)
La saison de lamour / Season of Love /
Mawsim hubb (Rashid Masharawi, 2001,
Palestine)
La sance est leve / The Session Is Over / Wa
roufiat al-Jalsa (Georges Ghayad, 1986,
Lebanon)
La sductrice et laventurier / The Seductress and the Adventurer / al-Fatina wal
moughamer (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1985,
Lebanon)
La sirne / The Siren / Arouss al-bahr (Samir
La souffrance des mres / Mothers Suffering
/ Azab al-oumahat (Rida Myassar, 1982,
Lebanon)
La terre des trangers / A Land for Strangers /
Turab al-ajaneb (Samir Zikra, 1998, Syria)
La tte / The Head / al-Ras (Fayal al-Yasseri,
1976, Iraq)
La traverse / The Crossing / al-Ekhtiraq
(Kanam Kanam, 1974, Syria)
La valle verte / The Green Valley / al-Wadi alakhdar (Zuharyr al-Shawwa, 1950, Syria)
La vendeuse de fleurs / The Flower Seller /
Bayyaat al-ward (Ali al-Ariss, 1943, Lebanon)
La victoire dans ses yeux / Victory in His Eyes
/ Al nasr fi unynihim (Samir Nasr, 1976,
Palestine)
La victoire du vaincu / The Victory of the Vanquished / Intissar al-mounhazem (Samir
Nasri, 1966, Lebanon)
174
La vie aprs la chute / Life After the Fall / Hatay ma baad al-suqoot (Kassim Abid, 2008,
Iraq) (documentary)
La vie est une mlodie / Life Is a Melody /
al-Dounya nagham (Samir al-Ghoussayni,
1975, Lebanon)
La vie quotidien dans un village syrien /
Everyday Life in a Syrian Village / Al-hayat
al-yawmiya fi qaria Suriya (Omar Amiralay, 1974, Syria) (documentary)
La ville tranquille / The Quiet City (Hassan
Ridha, 1972, Syria)
La vision / The Vision / al-Rouya (Youssef
La visiteuse / The Visitor (Henri Barakat,
1972, Lebanon)
La voie de lamour / The Path of Love / Darb
al-Hob (Borhan al-Din Jassem, 1966, Iraq)
La voie des tnbres / The Path of Darkness
/ Tariq al-dalam (Abdel Karem al-Saraj,
1970, Iraq)
La voie du mal / The Path of Evil / Trik al-char
(Sami al-Jader, 1967, Iraq)
La voie lacte / The Milky Way / Darb altahanat (Ali Nasser, 1996, Palestine)
La voleuse / The Woman Thief / al-Sarika
(Youssef Charafeddine, 1991, Lebanon)
La volont du peuple / The Will of the People
/ Iradat al-chab (Borhan al-Din Jassem,
1959, Iraq)
Lady of the Palace, The / La dame du palais /
Sayidat el-kasr (Samir Habchi, 2003, Lebanon) (documentary)
Lady with the Dark Glasses, The / La dame
aux lunes noires / Saydat al-akmar alsawda (Samir Khoury, 1971, Lebanon)
Lailas Birthday / Lanniversaire de Laila
Land for Strangers, A / La terre des trangers /
Turab al-ajaneb (Samir Zikra, 1998, Syria)
Lailas Birthday / Lanniversaire de Laila
Last Decision, The / La dernire dcision /
Hobat al-madlum (Safa Mohamed Ali,
1961, Iraq)
Last Man, The / Le dernier homme / Atlal
(Ghassan Salhab, 2006, Lebanon)
Last Message, The / Le dernier message
(Khatib El Bassel, 2000, Syria)
Last Moon, The / La ultima luna (Miguel Littin, Palestine, 2004)

Last Night, The / La dernire nuit / al-Layl
al-akhir (Youssef Charafeddine, 1982,
Lebanon)
Last Passage, The / Le dernier passage / alMamar al-akhir (Youssef Charafeddine,
1981, Lebanon)
Layla en Irak / Leila in Iraq / Layla fi al Irak
(Ahmed Kamel Morsi, 1950, Iraq)
Layla et les loups / Leila and the Wolves /
Layla wa al-ziab (Heiny Srour, 1984,
Lebanon)
Le bon augure / The Good Omen / Chaif Khir
Le Caire-Bagdad / Cairo-Baghdad / Al-Kahira-Bagdad (Ahmed Badrakhan, 1945, Iraq)
Le camioneur / The Lorry Driver / Saiq ashshahina (Boshko Votchinitch, 1966, Syria)
Le canardeur / The Sniper / al-Qannes (Fayal
al-Yassiri, 1980, Iraq)
Le capitaine Abu Raed / Captain Abu Raed
(Amin Matalqa, 2007, Jordan)
Le cavalier de Bani Abes / The Horseman
of Bani Abes (Mohamed Selmane, 1977,
Syria)
Le cerf-volant / The Kite (Randa Chahal-Sabbag, 2003, Lebanon)
Le cheikh anglais et le gentleman ymnite /
The English Sheikh and the Yemeni Gentleman (Bader Ben Hirsi, 2000, Yemen)
(documentary)
Le cirque de loncle Vania et cie / Uncle Vania
and Co.s Circus / Cirque al-ame Vania wa
chourakah (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1991,
Lebanon)
Le collier de perles / The Pearl Necklace / Akd
al-loulou (Youssef Maalouf, 1964, Lebanon)
Le collier meutrier / The Deadly Necklace /
al-Akd al-katel (Ibrahim Takkouche, 1960,
Lebanon)
Le contrleur dautobus / The Bus Driver / alJabi (Jafar Ali, 1969, Iraq)
Le corps en feu / Body on Fire / Lahib al-jassad
Le couteau / The Knife / al-Sikkin (Khaled
Hamada, 1972, Syria)
Le cri / The Cry / al-Sarkha (Fouad Charafeddine, 1991, Lebanon)

Le dplacement / The Displacement / al-Terhal
(Raymond Boutros, 1997, Syria)
Le dernier homme / The Last Man / Atlal
(Ghassan Salhab, 2006, Lebanon)
Le dernier message / The Last Message (Khatib
El Bassel, 2000, Syria)
Le dernier passage / The Last Passage / alMamar al-akhir (Youssef Charafeddine,
1981, Lebanon)
Le destin / Fate / al-Kadar (Mounir Maasri,
1972, Lebanon)
Le diable de lle / The Island Devil / Chaitane
al-jazira (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1981,
Lebanon)
Le drame dune fille de lorient / The Drama
of a Girl from the East / Maasat fatt
sharqiya (Mohamed Shahin, 1983, Syria)
Le facteur / The Postman / Saii al-barid
Le fantme du pass / The Ghost from the Past
/ Chabah almadi (Georges Ghayad, 1984,
Lebanon)
Le faucon des arabes / The Arab Falcon / Sakr
al-arab (Rida Myassar, 1966, Lebanon)
Le fils de lOrient / Son of the East / Ibn alChark (Niazi Mostafa, 1945, Iraq)
Le fleuve / The River / al-Nahr (Fayal alYassiri, 1977, Iraq)
Le gang de la libert / The Freedom Gang / alSheikha (Layla Assaf, 1994, Lebanon)
Le hnissement des directions / Noises from All
Sides / Sahil al-jibat (Maher Kaddo, 1993,
Syria).
Le jaguar noir / The Black Jaguar / al-Jaguar
al-sawda (Mohamed Selmane, 1965,
Lebanon)
Le jeu de lamour et de la mort / The Game of
Love and Death / Lubatu al-hubb was algatl (Mohamed Shahin, 1983, Syria)
Le jeu de Satan / Satans Game / Laabart ashshaytan (Zuhayr al-Shawwa, 1966, Syria)
Le jungle des loups / The Jungle of Wolves /
Ghbatu al-dib (Mohamed Shahin, 1977,
Syria)
Le kidnapp / Kidnapped / al-Makhtouf
(Fouad Joujou, 1983, Lebanon)
Le lopard / The Leopard / al-Fahd (Nabil alMaleh, 1972, Syria)
Le Liban, fait de pices et de morceaux / Lebanon: Bits and Pieces / Lubnan qita, qita
175
(Olga Nakkash, 1994, Lebanon) (documentary)
Le Liban, la nuit / Lebanon at Night /
Loubnan fi leil (Mohamed Selmane, 1963,
Lebanon)
Le Liban, malgr tout / Lebanon in Spite of
Everything / Loubnan roghm kulla shai
(Andr Gedeon, 1982, Lebanon)
Le Liban dans la tourmente / Lebanon in
Torment / Lubnn fi al-dawma (Jocelyne
Saab, 1975, Lebanon) (documentary)
Le lion du dsert / Lion of the Desert / Omar
al-Mukhtar (Mustapha Akkad, 1980, Syria)
Le mariage de Rana / Ranas Wedding / Urs
Rana (Hany Abu Assad, 2002, Palestine)
Le message / The Message a.k.a. Mohammad,
Messenger of God / al-Risalah (Mustapha
Akkad, 1976, Lebanon)
Le miel amer / Bitter Honey / al-Assal al-morr
Le millionaire / The Millionnaire (Youssef
Maalouf, 1965, Lebanon)
Le monde en lan 2000 / The World in the Year
2000 (Ahmed Fouad, 1972, Syria).
Le muet et lamour / The Mute Man and Love
/ al-Akhrass wal hub (Alfred Bahri, 1967,
Lebanon)
Le palestinien rvolt / The Palestinian in
Revolt / al-Filastini al-thaer (Rida Myassar,
1969, Lebanon)
Le parfum des pommes / The Smell of Apples
(Ravin Asaf, 2008, Iraq)
Le passant / The Passer-By / Abir sabil
(Ahmed Erfan, 1950, Syria)
Le petit tranger / The Little Stranger (Georges
Nasser, 1961, Lebanon)
Le pige / The Trap / al-Masyada (Wadeih
Yousef, 1979, Syria)
Le poison blanc / The White Poison / al-Sam
al-abiad (Georges Kahi, 1961, Lebanon)
Le pont dal-Ahrar / The al-Ahrar Bridge / Jisr
al-ahrar (Dia al-Bayati, 1970, Iraq)
Le pont des mchants / Bridge of the Wicked
Le premier chant / The First Song / al-Lahn alawal (Mohamed Selmane, 1957, Lebanon)
Le professeur Ayoub / Professor Ayoub / alOustaz Ayoub (Mohamed Selmane, 1975,
Lebanon)
176
Le progressiste / The Progressive / al-Sayyid altaqaddumi (Nabil al-Maleh, 1974, Syria)

Le quatorzime poussin / The Fourteenth
Chick / Het veertiende kippetje (Hany Abu
Assad 1998, Palestine)
Le rapport / The Report (Haytham Hakki,
1979, Syria)
Le rapport / The Report / al-Taqrr (Dureid
Le rsistant / The Resistance Fighter / al-Rajol
al-samed (Soubhi Seifeddine, 1975, Lebanon)
Le retour Haifa / Return to Haifa / Aid ila
Hayfa (Qassim Hawal, 1981, Iraq)
Le retour dHamidou / Hamidous Return /
Awdat Hamidu (Fayal al-Yassiri, 1974,
Iraq)
Le retour du hros / The Heros Return / Awdat
al-batal (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1983,
Lebanon)
Le rocher de lamour / The Rock of Love /
Sakhar al-hub (Rida Myassar, 1959, Lebanon)
Le rouge, le blanc et le noir / Red, White and
Black / al-Ahmar wa al-abyad wa al-aswad
(Bashir Safia, 1977, Syria)
Le royaume des pauvres / The Realm of the
Poor / Mamlakat al-foukara (Philippe
Akiki, 1967, Lebanon)
Le Sahara nest pas vendre / The Sahara Is
Not for Sale (Jocelyne Saab, 1977, Lebanon)
(documentary)
Le saut de la mort / The Death Leap / Kafzat
al-mawt (Youssef Charafeddine, 1982,
Lebanon)
Le sel de la mer / Salt of This Sea / Milh hadha
al-bahr (Annemarie Jacir, 2008, Palestine)
Le silence / al-Samt / The Silence / (Hashim
Muhammad, 1979, Kuwait)
Le souffle de lme / Breeze of the Soul / Nassim ar-ruh (Abdellatif Abdelhamid, 1999,
Syria)
Le sourire travers les larmes / Smiling
through the Tears / Basima bayna al-dum
(Wadeih Yousef, 1985, Syria)
Le sud rvolt / The South in Revolt / alJanoub al-thaer (Rida Myassar, 1984,
Lebanon)
Le temps des narcisses / Narcissus Blossom /

Massoud Arif Salih, 2005, Iraq)
Le temps quil reste / The Time That Remains
/ al-Zaman al-baqi (Elia Suleiman, 2009,
Palestine)
Le toit / The Roof / al-Sateh (Kamal al-Jafari,
Le tourbillon / The Tornado / al-Isar (Samir
Habchi, 1992, Lebanon)
Le tournant / The Turning / al-Munataf
(Jafar Ali, 1974, Iraq)
Le train de sept heures / The Seven Oclock
Train / Qitar al-saa sabaa (Hikmet Labib,
1963, Iraq)
Le veilleur de nuit / The Night Watchman / alHaris (Khahil Chawqi, 1968, Iraq)
Le vendeur de bagues / The Seller of Rings /
Biya al-khawatim (Youssef Chahine, 1965,
Lebanon)
Le village dun seul homme / The One-Man
Village / Samaan bildayaa (Simon El Habre, 2008, Lebanon) (documentary)
Le voleur sympathique / The Likeable Thief /
al-Loss al-zarif (Youssef Issa, 1968, Lebanon)
Lebanon: Bits and Pieces / Le Liban, fait de
pices et de morceaux / Lubnan qita, qita
(Olga Nakkash, 1994, Lebanon)
Lebanon at Night / Le Liban, la nuit /
Loubnan fi leil (Mohamed Selmane, 1963,
Lebanon)
Lebanon in Torment / Le Liban dans la tourmente / Lubnan fi al-dawma (Jocelyne
Saab, 1975, Lebanon) (documentary)
Lebanon in Spite of Everything / Le Liban,
malgr tout / Loubnan roghmakulla shai
(Andr Gedeon, 1982, Lebanon)
Leila and the Wolves / Layla et les loups /
Layla wa al-ziab (Heiny Srour, 1984,
Lebanon)
Leila in Iraq / Layla en Irak / Layla fi al Irak
(Ahmed Kamel Morsi, 1950, Iraq)
Leopard, The / Le lopard / al-Fahd (Nabil alMaleh, 1972, Syria)
Lpreuve du besoin / Sense of Need (Shadi
Srour, 2004, Palestine)
Les ailes brises / The Broken Wings / al-Ajniha al-mutakassira (Youssef Maalouf, 1964,
Lebanon)

Les algues deau douce a.k.a. Les gourmands
/ The Greedy Ones / al-Tahalib (Raymond
Les amants de la ligne de dmarcation de
la pluie / The Lovers of the Demarcation
Line of the Rain / Ushaq ala khat al-matar
(Mustafa Rasid, 1993, Syria).
Les amants en route / Lovers on the Road /
Ushqal al-tariq (Fayal al-Yassiri, 1977,
Iraq)
Les arrivants par la mer / Arrivals from the
Sea (Seif-Eddine Chawkat, 1977, Syria)
Les assoiffs / The Thirsty Ones / al-Damiun
Les aventures de Chouchou / Chouchous
Adventures / Moughamarat Chouchou
(Mohamed Selmane, 1966, Lebanon)
Les aventuriers / The Adventurers / alMoughamiron (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1981,
Lebanon)
Les cavaliers de la libration / The Horsemen
of Liberation (Souheil Kanaan, 1974, Syria)
Les chants de mon amour / The Songs of My
Love / Angham habibi (Mohamed Selmane, 1959, Lebanon)
Les chattes de la rue Hamra / The She-Cats
of Hamra Street / Kotat char al-Hamra
Les chercheurs / The Searchers / al-Bahithun
(Mohamed Youssef al-Janabi, 1978, Iraq)
Les cinq matres chanteurs / The Five Master
Singers (Nagdi Hafez, 1974, Syria)
Les cloches du retour / The Bells of Return
/ Ajrass al-awda (Taysir Abboud, 1969,
Lebanon)
Les conqurants / The Conquerors / al-Kahiroun (Frank Agrama, 1966, Lebanon).
Les deux amis / The Two Friends (Hassan alSafi, 1970, Syria),
Les dupes / The Duped / al-Makhdhououn
(Tewfiq Saleh, 1972, Syria)
Les enfants de Palestine / The Children of
Palestine / Affl Filasyn (Samir Nasr, 1977,
Palestine)
Les fauteurs / The Agitators (Mohamed Shahin, 1975, Syria)
Les fdayins / The Freedom Fighters / al-Fidaiyyoun (Christian Ghazi, 1967, Lebanon)
Les figurants / The Extras / al-Kombars (Nabil
al-Maleh, 1993, Syria)
177
Les flics / The Cops (Josef Fars, 2003, Lebanon)
Les frontires / Borders / al-Hudud (Dureid
Les gourmands a.k.a. Les algues deau douce
/ The Greedy Ones / al-Tahalib (Raymond
Les hroiques formations ariennes / The Heroic Airforce Formations / Kharq el-akhtr
(Marouan Alkawey, 1974, Syria)
Les hros naissent deux fois / Heroes Are Born
Twice / al-Abtal yuadun marrayayn (Salah
Dehny, 1977, Syria)
Les hors-la-loi / The Outlaws (Youssef
Les infidles / The Infidels (Randa Chahal Sabbag, 1997, Lebanon)
Les longues journes / The Long Days / alAyyam al-tawla (Tewfiq Saleh, 1980, Iraq)
Les loups ne mangent pas la chair frache /
Wolves Do Not Eat Raw Meat / Ziab la
taakol al-lahm (Samir Khoury, 1972,
Lebanon)
Les maisons de cette ruelle / The Houses in
That Alley / Bitut fi dhalika al-zuqaq (Qassim Hawal, 1977, Iraq)
Les murs a.k.a. Les remparts / The Walls /
al-Aswar (Mohamed Choukri Jamil, 1979,
Iraq)
Les noces de la terre / Marriage of the Land
/ Urs al-ard (Soubhi Seifeddine, 1978,
Lebanon)
Les noces de Zein / The Wedding of Zein / Urs
al-Zayn (Khalid al-Siddick, 1976, Kuwait)
Les nuits de Bagdad / Baghdad Nights / Layali
Bagdad (Borhan al-Din Jassem, 1975, Iraq)
Les nuits de douleur / Painful Nights / Layali
al-adab (Jawad al-Obali, 1963, Iraq)
Les nuits du chacal / The Nights of the Jackal
/ Layali ibn awa (Abdelatif Abdelhamid,
1989, Syria)
Les ombres du silence / Shadow of Silence /
Dhalal al-samt (Abdullah al-Moheissen,
2006, Saudi Arabia)
Les plus beaux jours de ma vie / The Best Days
of My Life / (Henri Barakat, 1973, Lebanon)
Les prostitues de lavenue Al Aram / The
Prostitutes of the Al Aram Avenue (Nagdi
Hafez, 1973, Syria)
178
Les rves de la ville / City Dreams / Ahlam alMadina (Mohamed Malas, 1984, Syria)
Les restes dune guerre / Remnants of a War
(Jawad Metni, 2009, Lebanon) (documentary)
Les subterfuges damour / Loves Subterfuges
(Youssef Maalouf, 1972, Syria)
Les tentes de Qaraqoz / The Tents of Qaraqoz
/ Khaymatu Quaraqoz (Mohamed Shahin,
1974, Syria)
Les vagabonds / The Tramps / al-Charidan
Life After the Fall / La vie aprs la chute / Hatay ma baad al-suqoot (Kassim Abid, 2008,
Iraq) (documentary)
Life Is a Melody / La vie est une mlodie /
al-Dounya nagham (Samir al-Ghoussayni,
1975, Lebanon)
Lifes Lesson / La leon de la vie / Ababathu alhayat (Mohamed al-Ansari, 1958, Iraq)
Light and Darkness / Lumire et tnbre /
Nouron wa thilal (Nazih Shahbandar, 1947,
Syria)
Likeable Thief, The / Le voleur sympathique /
al-Loss al-zarif (Youssef Issa, 1968, Lebanon)
Lila dit a / Lila Says That (Ziad Doueiri,
2004, Lebanon)
Lila Says That / Lila dit a (Ziad Doueiri,
2004, Lebanon)
Lion of the Desert / Le lion du dsert / Omar
al-Mukhtar (Mustapha Akkad, 1980, Syria)
Little Stranger, The / Le petit tranger (Georges Nasser, 1961, Lebanon)
Little Strength, A / Un peu de force / Cha min
al-quwwah (Karlo Hartyon, 1988, Iraq)
Little Wars / Petites guerres / Houroub saghira
Littoral (Wajdi Mouawad, 2004, Lebanon)
Long Days, The / Les longues journes / alAyyam al-tawla (Tewfiq Saleh, 1980, Iraq)
Long Live the Bride ... and the Liberation of
Kurdistan / Vive la marie ... et la libration du Kurdistan (Hiner Saleem, 1997,
Iraq)
Long Night, The / La longue nuit (Hatem Mohamed, 2009, Syria)
Looking for Princess Leila / la recherche de
la princesse Layla / al-Baath ... an Layla
al-amiriyyah (Qassim Hawal, 1992, Iraq)
Lorry Driver, The / Le camioneur / Saiq ashshahina (Boshko Votchinitch, 1966, Syria)
Lorsque le peuple a parl / When the People
Spoke / Indama rtakalam al-shaab (Amer
al-Zuhair, 2007, Kuwait) (documentary)
Losing Ahmad / En perdant Ahmad (Abdullah
Boushahri, 2006, Kuwait) (documentary)
Lost Man, A / Un homme perdu (Danielle
Arbid, 2007, Lebanon)
Louange pour lamour / Praise for Love / Ya
salam al-hub (Mohamed Selmane, 1963,
Lebanon)
Love and Karat / Lamour et karat / Hubb
wa karati (Fayal al-Yassiri, 1973, Iraq)
Love for Life / Lamour pour la vie / Hubbun
lil-hayt (Bashir Safia, 1981, Syria)
Love in Baghdad / Lamour Bagdad / alHubb fi Baghdad (Abdelhadi al-Rawi,
1986, Iraq)
Love in Constantinople / Amour Constantinople (Seif-Eddine Chawkat, 1967, Syria)
Love in Istanbul / Lamour Istamboul /
Gharam fi Istambul (Tahsine Kawadri,
1966, Lebanon)
Love Story, A / Histoire damour / Hikayat
gharam (Mohamed Selmane, 1963, Lebanon)
Loves Guitar / La guitare de lamour / Guitare
al-hub (Mohamed Selmane, 1973, Lebanon)
Loves Subterfuges / Les subterfuges damour
(Youssef Maalouf, 1972, Syria)
Lover, The / Lamant / al-Ashiq (Mohamed
Munir Fanari, 1986, Iraq)
Lovers of the Demarcation Line of the Rain,
The / Les amants de la ligne de dmarcation de la pluie / Ushaq ala khat al-matar
(Mustafa Rasid, 1993, Syria).
Lovers on the Road / Les amants en route /
Ushqal al-tariq (Fayal al-Yassiri, 1977,
Iraq)
Lumire et tnbre / Light and Darkness /
Nouron wa thilal (Nazih Shahbandar, 1947,
Syria)
Lutte jusqu la libration / Struggle till
Liberation / Kifah hatta al-Tahrir (Abdel
Wahab al-Hindi, 1969, Jordan)

Ma chrie / My Darling (Henri Barakat, 1973,
Lebanon)
Ma femme Youppie / My Wifes a Hippy /
Zawjati min al-hippies (Atef Salem, 1973,
Syria)
Ma patrie bien aime / My Beloved Homeland
/ Watani habibi (Mohamed Kaouach,
1964, Jordan)
Maaraka / Maarak (Roger Assaf, 1984,
Lebanon)
Maarak / Maaraka (Roger Assaf, 1984,
Lebanon)
Madness of Adolescent Girls, The / La folie
des adolescentes / Jounoun al- mourahikat
(Taysir Abboud, 1969, Lebanon)
Maisons fragiles / Fragile Houses / Bouyout
min warak (Rafic Hajjar, 1984, Lebanon)
Mameluke Jabers Adventure, The / Laventure
du Mamelouk Jaber / Mughamarat alMamluk Jaber (Mohamed Shahin, 1974,
Syria)
Man, The / Lhomme / al-Rajul (Fayal alYassiri, 1968, Iraq)
Man Is Needed, A / On demand un homme /
al-Matloup rajol wahed (Georges Nasser,
1975, Lebanon)
Manhunt / La chasse lhomme / Saydu alrijl (Bashir Safia, 1976, Syria)
Marriage of the Land / Les noces de la terre
/ Urs al-ard (Soubhi Seifeddine, 1978,
Lebanon)
Mawal / Mawal al-akdam al-zahabia (Mohamed Selmane, 1966, Lebanon)
Me, the Radar / Moi, le radar / Ana al-radar
(Wiam al-Saidi, 1986, Lebanon)
Lika fi tadmor (Youssef Maalouf, 1965,
Lebanon)
Meeting of Strangers / Rencontre des
trangres (Sayed Tantawi, 1967, Syria)
Melodrama Habibi / Une chanson dans la tte
(Hany Tamba, 2008, Lebanon)
Mmoires palestiniennes / Palestinian Memories (Amin Bunni, 1991, Syria) (documentary)
Memories / Souvenirs / Zikrayat (Georges
Kahi, 1958, Lebanon)
nuit damour (Seif-Eddine Chawkat, 1973,
Syria)
179
Men Under the Sun / Des hommes sous le
soleil / Rijalun tahta ash-shams (Nabil alMalih, Mohamed Shahin and Mohamed
Muwaddin, 1970, Syria)
Mens Nights / Nuits des hommes (Hassan alSafi, 1975, Syria).
Meshwar (Samir Habchi, 2001, Lebanon)
Message, The a.k.a. Mohammad, Messenger of
God / Le message / al-Risalah (Mustapha
Akkad, 1976, Lebanon)
Messages verbaux / Verbal Messages / Rasail
al Shafahyya (Abdellatif Abdelhamid,
1991, Syria)
Mexico Trip / Des aventures comiques au
Mexique (Seif-Eddine Chawkat, 1972,
Syria)
Milky Way, The / La voie lacte / Darb altahanat (Ali Nasser, 1996, Palestine)
Millionaire, The / Le millionaire (Youssef
Maalouf, 1965, Lebanon)
Mission officielle / Official Mission (Seif-Eddine Chawkat, 1975, Syria)
Mohammad, Messenger of God a.k.a. The
Message / Le message / al-Risalah (Mustapha Akkad, 1976, Lebanon)
Moi, le radar / Me, the Radar / Ana al-radar
(Wiam al-Saidi, 1986, Lebanon)
Mon amour ternel / My Eternal Love /
Hopubi lazi la yamout (Youssef Charafeddine, 1984, Lebanon)
Mon cur ne bat que pour elle / My Heart
Beats Only for Her / Ma hataftu li ghayriha
(Mohamed Souweid, 2009, Lebanon)
Moneylender, The / Lusurier / al-Marabi (Mohamed Shahin, 1999, Syria)
Monsieur Gold / Mr. Gold / Mr. Gold (Samir
Monsieur risque-tout / Mr. Risk-Everything /
al-Moujazef (Youssef Charafeddine, 1983,
Lebanon)
Moon and the Sun, The / La lune et le soleil /
al-Qamar wash-shams (Ibrahim Hassan
Sarhane [Sirhan], 1957, Jordan)
Mothers Suffering / La souffrance des mres
/ Azab al-oumahat (Rida Myassar, 1982,
Lebanon)
Mr. Gold / Monsieur Gold / Mr. Gold (Samir
Mr. Risk-Everything / Monsieur risque-tout /
al-Moujazef (Youssef Charafeddine, 1983,
Lebanon)
180
Murder Step by Step, A / Un meutre pas pas

/ Qatlun ... an tariq al-tasalsul (Mohamed
Muse and Amber / Muse et ambres (Mohamed
Dhiaddine, 1973, Syria)
Muse et ambres / Muse and Amber (Mohamed
Dhiaddine, 1973, Syria)
Mutawa and Bahia / Mutawa et Bahia / Mutawa wa Bahia (Sahib Hadad and Zuhair
al-Dijaili, 1982, Iraq)
Mutawa et Bahia / Mutawa and Bahia / Mutawa wa Bahia (Sahib Hadad and Zuhair
al-Dijaili, 1982, Iraq)
Mute Man and Love, The / Le muet et lamour
/ al-Akhrass wal hub (Alfred Bahri, 1967,
Lebanon)
My Beloved Homeland / Ma patrie bien aime
/ Watani habibi (Mohamed Kaouach,
1964, Jordan)
My Darling / Ma chrie (Henri Barakat, 1973,
Lebanon)
My Eternal Love / Mon amour ternel /
Hopubi lazi la yamout (Youssef Charafeddine, 1984, Lebanon)
My Heart Beats Only for Her / Mon cur ne
bat que pour elle / Ma hataftu li ghayriha
(Mohamed Souweid, 2009, Lebanon)
My Wifes a Hippy / Ma femme Youppie /
Zawjati min al-hippies (Atef Salem, 1973,
Syria)
(Nizar Hassan, 1996, Palestine)
Mythologies / Myth a.k.a. Ostura / Ustura
Nabuchodonsor / Nebuchadnezzar / Nabuocher nosser (Kamel al-Azzawi, 1962, Iraq)
Naima (Adbl Jaber Wali, 1962, Iraq)
Naissance du prophte / Birth of the Prophet
/ Mawled al-rassoul (Ahmed al-Toukhi,
1960, Lebanon)
Narcissus Blossom / Le temps des narcisses /
Massoud Arif Salih, 2005, Iraq)
Ne dites pas adieu un jour qui na gure
pass / Dont Say Goodbye to a Day Thats
Scarcely Gone / La taqIuli wadan lil ams
(Mohamed Shahin, 1977, Syria)
Ne touche pas ma femme / Do Not Touch My
Wife / Idak an mrati (Rida Myassar, 1967,
Lebanon)
Nebuchadnezzar / Nabuchodonsor / Nabuocher nosser (Kamel al-Azzawi, 1962, Iraq)

New Day in Old Sanaa, A / Un jour nouveau
dans le vieux Sanaa (Bader Ben Hirsi,
2005, Yemen)
Night, The / La nuit / al-Layl (Mohamed Malas, 1992, Syria)
Night Watchman, The / Le veilleur de nuit /
al-Haris (Khahil Chawqi, 1968, Iraq)
Nightfall a.k.a. Until the End of the Day /
Jusquau dclin du jour (Mohamed Souweid, 2000, Lebanon) (documentary).
Nightingale in Lebanon, A / Un rossignol du
Liban / Boulbol min Loubnan(Riad Myassar, 1982, Lebanon)
Nights of the Jackal, The / Les nuits du chacal
/ Layali ibn awa (Abdelatif Abdelhamid,
1989, Syria)
Niloofar (Sabine El Gemayel, 2008, Lebanon)
Noce en Galile / Wedding in Galilee / Urs aljalil (Michel Khleifi, 1987, Palestine)
Noises from All Sides / Le hnissement des
directions / Sahil al-jibat (Maher Kaddo,
1993, Syria).
Nos guerres imprudents / Our Heedless Wars
/ Hurubina al-taisha (Randa Chahal Sabbagh, 1995, Lebanon)
Nos petits rois / Our Little Kings / Mulkund
al-sighar (Andr Gedeon, 1984. Lebanon)
Nos sentiments ont pris les images images
de lIrak / Our Feelings Took the Pictures:
Open Shutters Iraq (Maysoon Pachachi,
Not Quite the Taliban / Pas encore le Taliban
(Fadi Hindash, 2009, Jordan) (documentary)
Nous retournerons un jour / We Shall Return
One Day (Samir Abdallah and Walid Charara, 1998, Lebanon) (documentary)
Nous sommes tous des fdayins / We Are All
Freedom Fighters / Koullouna fidaiyyoun
(Gary Garabdian, 1969, Lebanon)
Nuage / Cloud / Sahb (Mohamed Shahin,
1991, Syria)
Nuits des hommes / Mens Nights (Hassan alSafi, 1975, Syria).
nuit / Oh Night / Ya leil (Gary Garabdian,
1964, Lebanon)
Obstacle, The / Lobstacle / Al-hajiz (Bassam
al-Thawadi, 1990, Bahrain)

October Is Coming / Loctobre vient / Wa ja
tashrn (Wadeih Yousef, 1973, Syria)
Official Mission / Mission officielle (Seif-Eddine Chawkat, 1975, Syria)
Oh mer / Oh Sea (Mohamed Shahin, 1993,
Syria)
Oh Night / nuit / Ya leil (Gary Garabdian,
1964, Lebanon)
Oh Sea / Oh mer (Mohamed Shahin, 1993,
Syria)
Olive Harvest, The / La cueillette des olives /
Mawsim al-zaytoon (Hanna Elias, 2002,
Palestine)
On a Rainy Day / Un jour pluvieux / Fi
yawmin mumtir (Mohamed Shahin, 1984,
Syria)
On demand un homme / A Man Is Needed /
al-Matloup rajol wahed (Georges Nasser,
1975, Lebanon)
Once More / Encore une fois / Mara okhra
(Joud Saeed, 2009, Syria)
Once upon a Time, Beirut a.k.a. The Story of
a Star / Il tait une fois Beyrouth, histoire
dune star / Kan ya ma kan Beirut a.k.a.
Lebanon)
One Plus One / 1 + 1 (Youssef Maalouf, 1971,
Syria)
One-Man Village, The / Le village dun seul
homme / Samaan bildayaa (Simon El Habre, 2008, Lebanon) (documentary)
Opration: golden phnix / Operation: Golden
Phoenix / Amaliat al-taer al-zahabi (Samir
Operation: Golden Phoenix / Opration:
golden phnix / Amaliat al-taer al-zahabi
Oprations six heures / Operations at 6
Oclock / Amalyat al-saa 6 (Seif-Eddine
Chawkat, 1969, Syria)
Operations at 6 Oclock / Oprations six
heures / Amalyat al-saa 6 (Seif-Eddine
Chawkat, 1969, Syria)
Orchard of Love / Verger damour / Karm alhawa (Mohamed Selmane, 1970, Lebanon)
Order of the Day / Lordre du jour (Michel
Khleifi, 1993, Palestine)
Oriental Story, An / Une histoire orientale /
Hikya sharqiyya (Najdat Ismal Anzur,
Jordan, 1991)
181
Ostura a.k.a. Myth / Mythologies / Ustura
Oublie Bagdad: Juifs et Arabesla connection irakienne / Forget Baghdad: Jews and
ArabsThe Iraqi Connection (Samir, 2002,
Iraq)
Our Feelings Took the Pictures: Open Shutters
Iraq / Nos sentiments ont pris les images
images de lIrak (Maysoon Pachachi, 2008,
Iraq) (documentary)
Our Heedless Wars / Nos guerres imprudents
/ Hurubina al-taisha (Randa ChahalSabbagh, 1995, Lebanon)
Our Little Kings / Nos petits rois / Mulkund
al-sighar (Andr Gedeon, 1984, Lebanon)
Out of Coverage / Hors rseau / Kahref altaghtiya (Abdellatif Abdelhamid, 2007,
Syria)
Outlaws, The / Les hors-la-loi (Youssef
Outside Life / Hors la vie / Kharif al-hayat
Painful Nights / Les nuits de douleur / Layali
al-adab (Jawad al-Obali, 1963, Iraq)
Palestine: A Peoples Record / La Palestine,
chronique dun peuple / Filstin, sjil sha
(Qays al-Zubaydi, 1984, Iraq) (documentary)
Palestine on Fire / La Palestine en feu / Filastin fi al-lahb (Samir Nimr,1988, Palestine)
(documentary)
septembre (Osama al-Zain, 2005, Palestine)
(documentary)
Palestinian in Revolt, The / Le palestinien rvolt / al-Filastini al-thaer (Rida Myassar,
1969, Lebanon)
Palestinian Memories / Mmoires palestiniennes (Amin Bunni, 1991, Syria) (documentary)
Paradise Now / al-Jinna alaam (Hany Abu
Assad, 2005, Palestine)
Pardonne-moi mon amour / Forgive Me, My
Love / Samehni habibi (Taysir Abboud,
1981, Lebanon)
Paris and Love / Paris et lamour / Baris alhub (Mohamed Selmane, 1971, Lebanon)
Paris et lamour / Paris and Love / Baris alhub (Mohamed Selmane, 1971, Lebanon)
182
Pas encore le Taliban / Not Quite the Taliban

(Fadi Hindash, 2009, Jordan) (documentary)
Passer-By, The / Le passant / Abir sabil
(Ahmed Erfan, 1950, Syria)
Passeurs de rve / Beyond Our Dreams (Hiner
Saleem, 1999, Iraq)
Passion en feu / Passion on Fire / Nar alchawk (Mohamed Selmane, 1971, Lebanon)
Passion on Fire / Passion en feu / Nar alchawk (Mohamed Selmane, 1971, Lebanon)
Passions / Bab el-maqam (Mohamed Malas,
2005, Syria)
Path of Darkness, The / La voie des tnbres
/ Tariq al-dalam (Abdel Karem al-Saraj,
1970, Iraq)
Path of Dreams, The / Chemin des rves /
Rariq al-ahlam (Harry Sarkassian, 1973,
Lebanon)
Path of Evil, The / La voie du mal / Trik alchar (Sami al-Jader, 1967, Iraq)
Path of Love, The / La voie de lamour / Darb
al-Hob (Borhan al-Din Jassem, 1966, Iraq)
Pearl Necklace, The / Le collier de perles / Akd
al-loulou (Youssef Maalouf, 1964, Lebanon)
Perfect Day, A / Un jour parfait / Yawm akhar
(Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige,
2005, Lebanon)
Personal Inquiry / Enqute personnelle (Ula
Tabari)
Petites guerres / Little Wars / Houroub saghira
Planet of the Desert Princess, The / Kawkab,
princesse du dsert / Kawkab amirat assahra (Ali al-Ariss, 1946, Lebanon)
Pomegranates and Myrrh / La grenade et la
myrrhe / Al-Mor wa al-rumman (Najwa
Najjar, 2008, Lebanon)
Postman, The / Le facteur / Saii al-barid
Pour femmes seulement / For Women Only
/ Lil nisaa fakat (Antoine Remy, 1966,
Lebanon)
Pour la patrie / For the Homeland / Min ajl
al-watan (Fawzi al-Janabi, 1962, Iraq)
Pour qui chante lamour / For Whoever Sings
of Love / Liman youghanni al-hub (Wiam
al-Saidi, 1991, Lebanon)
Pour qui se lve le soleil / For Whom the Sun

Rises / Liman tachrok al-chams (Joseph
Fahdi, 1958, Lebanon)
Pour toi Palestine / For You, Oh Palestine /
Fidaki ya Phalestine (Antoine Remy, 1969,
Lebanon)
Praise for Love / Louange pour lamour / Ya
salam al-hub (Mohamed Selmane, 1963,
Lebanon)
Princess and the River, The / La princesse et
le fleuve / al-Amira wal-Nahr (Fayal alYassiri, 1982, Iraq) (animated feature)
Professor Ayoub / Le professeur Ayoub / alOustaz Ayoub (Mohamed Selmane, 1975,
Lebanon)
Progressive, The / Le progressiste / al-Sayyid
al-taqaddumi (Nabil al-Maleh, 1974, Syria)
Projet de mariage / Wedding Proposal /
Mashro zawadj (Kameran Hassani, 1962,
Iraq)
Prostitutes of the Al Aram Avenue, The / Les
prostitues de lavenue Al Aram (Nagdi
Hafez, 1973, Syria)
Public Relations / Relations Publiques / Alaqat
ammah (Samir Zikra, 2005, Syria)
Quand Maryam sest dvoile / When Maryam Spoke Out / Lamma hikyit Maryam
(Assad Fouladkar, 2001, Lebanon)
Quatre filles / Four Girls (Hassan al-Halibi,
2008, Bahrain)
Queen of Love, The / La reine de lamour /
Malikat al-hob (Romeo Lahoud, 1972,
Lebanon)
Quelque chose brle / Something Is Burning /
Shayma yahtariq (Ghassan Shmeit, 1993,
Syria).
Qui est responsable? / Who Is Responsible? /
Man al-masoul? (Abdl Jaber Wali, 1956,
Iraq)
Qui teint le feu? / Who Puts Out the Fire? /
Man youtfii al-nar (Mohamed Selmane,
1982, Lebanon)
Quiet City, The / La ville tranquille (Hassan
Ridha, 1972, Syria)
Racines / Roots / al-Judhur (Samir Nimr,
Ranas Wedding / Le mariage de Rana /
Urs Rana (Hany Abu Assad, 2002, Palestine)

Realm of the Poor, The / Le royaume des
pauvres / Mamlakat al-foukara (Philippe
Akiki, 1967, Lebanon)
Recyclage / Recycle / Eaadat khalk (Mahmoud
Massad, 2007, Jordan) (documentary)
Recycle / Recyclage / Eaadat khalk (Mahmoud
Massad, 2007, Jordan) (documentary)
Red Flowers / Fleurs rouges / Zouhour hamra
(Michel Haroun, 1957, Lebanon)
Red on the Snow / Rouge sur neige / Dimaa altalj (Wiam al-Saidi, 1963, Lebanon)
Red, White and Black / Le rouge, le blanc et le
noir / al-Ahmar wa al-abyad wa al-aswad
(Bashir Safia, 1977, Syria)
Regrets / Nadam (Abdl Khaliq al-Samari,
1955, Iraq)
Relations Publiques / Public Relations / Alaqat
ammah (Samir Zikra, 2005, Syria)
Remnants of a War / Les restes dune guerre
(Jawad Metni, 2009, Lebanon) (documentary)
Remords / Remorse / Azab al-damir (Georges
Remorse / Remords / Azab al-damir (Georges
Rencontre Palmyre / Meeting at Palmyra /
Lika fi tadmor (Youssef Maalouf, 1965,
Lebanon)
Rencontre des trangres / Meeting of Strangers (Sayed Tantawii, 1967, Syria)
Rendez-vous avec lamour / Rendezvous
with Love / Moad maa al-hub (Youssef
Rendez-vous avec lespoir / Rendezvous with
Hope / Moad maa al-amal (Mohamed
Rendezvous with Hope / Rendez-vous avec
lespoir / Moad maa al-amal (Mohamed
lamour / Moad maa al-hub (Youssef
Report, The / Le rapport (Haytham Hakki,
1979, Syria)
Report, The / Le rapport / al-Taqrr (Dureid
Resistance Fighter, The / Le rsistant / alRajol al-samed (Soubhi Seifeddine, 1975,
Lebanon)
Retour la campagne / Return to the Countryside (Faleh Abdel Aziz, 1963, Iraq)
183
Retour au pays des merveilles / Return to the
Land of Wonders (Maysoon Pachachi,
Return to Haifa / Le retour Haifa / Aid ila
Hayfa (Qassim Hawal, 1981, Iraq)
Return to the Countryside / Retour la campagne (Faleh Abdel Aziz, 1963, Iraq)
pays des merveilles (Maysoon Pachachi,
Rves / Dreams / Ahlaam (Mohamed al-Daradji, 2005, Iraq)
Rves de moineaux / The Dreams of Sparrows
/ (Hayder Mousa Daffar, 2005, Iraq) (documentary)
Reward, The / La rcompense / Al-jaza (Hussen al-Samara, 1970, Iraq)
Rising Rain, The / La monte de la pluie /
Suud al-matar (Abdellatif Abdelhamid,
1996, Syria)
River, The / Le fleuve / al-Nahr (Fayal alYassiri, 1977, Iraq)
Road 181: Fragments of a Journey / Route 181:
fragments dun voyage en Palestine-Isral
(Michel Khleifi, with Eyal Sivan, Palestine,
2004) (documentary)
Road to Jerusalem, The / La route de Jrusalem / al-Tarikila al-Qods (Abdel Wahab
al-Hindi, 1969, Jordan)
Rock of Love, The / Le rocher de lamour /
Sakhar al-hub (Rida Myassar, 1959, Lebanon)
Roof, The / Le toit / al-Sateh (Kamal al-Jafari,
Room No. 7 / Chambre No. 7 / Gorfa raqm
sabaa (Kameran Hassani, 1964, Iraq)
Roots / Racines / al-Judhur (Samir Nimr,
Rouge sur neige / Red on the Snow / Dimaa altalj (Wiam al-Saidi, 1963, Lebanon)
Route 181: fragments dun voyage en PalestineIsral / Road 181: Fragments of a Journey
(Michel Khleifi, with Eyal Sivan, Palestine,
2004) (documentary)
Sabah (Ruba Nadda, 2004, Syria)
Sabiha, Seductress of the Desert / Sabiha la
sductrice du dsert (Mohamed Solfan,
1975, Syria)
184
Sabiha la sductrice du dsert / Sabiha, Seductress of the Desert (Mohamed Solfan, 1975,
Syria)
Sables dor / Golden Sands / Rimal min thaheb
(Youssef Chahine, 1967, Lebanon)
Sacrifices / Sanduq al-dunia (Oussama Mohamed, 2001, Syria)
Safar Barlek / Safar Barlek (Henri Barakat,
1967, Lebanon)
Sahara Is Not for Sale, The / Le Sahara nest
pas vendre (Jocelyne Saab, 1977, Lebanon) (documentary)
Sad Effendi (Kameran Hassani, 1956, Iraq)
Salam baad al-mawt (Georges Chamchoum, 1971, Lebanon)
Salam aprs la mort / Salam After Death /
Salam baad al-mawt (Georges Chamchoum, 1971, Lebanon)
Salt of This Sea / Le sel de la mer / Milh hadha
al-bahr (Annemarie Jacir, 2008, Palestine)
Satans Game / Le jeu de Satan / Laabart ashshaytan (Zuhayr al-Shawwa, 1966, Syria)
Screens of Sand / crans de sable (Randa
Chahal-Sabbag, 1991, Lebanon)
Searchers, The / Les chercheurs / al-Bahithun
(Mohamed Youssef al-Janabi, 1978, Iraq)
Season of Love / La saison de lamour /
Mawsim hubb (Rashid Masharawi, 2001,
Palestine)
Seductress and the Adventurer, The / La
sductrice et laventurier / al-Fatinawal
moughamer (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1985,
Lebanon)
Seller of Rings, The / Le vendeur de bagues /
Biya al-khawatim (Youssef Chahine, 1965,
Lebanon)
Sense of Need / Lpreuve du besoin (Shadi
Srour, 2004, Palestine)
Session Is Over, The / La sance est leve / Wa
roufiat al-Jalsa (Georges Ghayad, 1986,
Lebanon)
Seven Oclock Train, The / Le train de sept
heures / Qitar al-saa sabaa (Hikmet Labib,
1963, Iraq)
Shadow of Absence / Lombre de labsence /
Dhil al-gheyab (Nasri Hajjaj, 2008, Palestine) (documentary)
Shadows of Silence / Les ombres du silence /

Dhalal al-samt (Abdullah al-Moheissen,
2006, Saudi Arabia)
Shadows of the City, The / Lombre de la ville
(Jean Chamoun, 2000, Lebanon)
Shadows on the Other Bank / Des ombres sur
lautre rive / Dill al al-jnibi al-khar
(Ghalib Shaath, 1973, Palestine)
Shame / La honte / al-Ar (Bilal al-Sabouni,
Bashir Safia, and Wadeih Yousef, 1974,
Syria)
Shame, Restoum / La honte, Restoum / Ayb ya
Restoum (Wiam al-Saidi, 1987, Lebanon)
She-Cats of Hamra Street, The / Les chattes
de la rue Hamra / Kotat char al-Hamra
Shelter, The / Labri / al-Malja (Rafic Hajjar,
1980, Lebanon)
Shrews, The / Chipies / Banat akker zamane
Silence, The / Le silence / al-Samt (Hashim
Muhammad, 1979, Kuwait)
Silent Traveller, A / Un voyageur silencieux
(Ibrahim Salman, 1992, Iraq)
Since You Left / Depuis que tu nes plus l /
Min youm ma ruhat (Mohamed Bakri,
Siren, The / La sirne / Arouss al-bahr (Samir
Slingshot Hip Hop (Jacqueline Salloum, 2008,
Palestine) (documentary)
Smell of Apples, The / Le parfum des pommes
(Ravin Asaf, 2008, Iraq)
Smiling through the Tears / Le sourire travers
les larmes / Basima bayna al-dum (Wadeih Yousef, 1985, Syria)
Sniper, The / Le canardeur / al-Qannes (Fayal
Soif / Thirst / Atash (Tawfik Abu Wael, 2004,
Palestine)
Something Is Burning / Quelque chose brle /
Shayma yahtariq (Ghassan Shmeit, 1993,
Syria).
Son of Babylon / Fils de Babylone / Ibn Babil
(Mohamed al-Daradji, 2009, Iraq)
Son of the East / Le fils de lOrient / Ibn alChark (Niazi Mostafa, 1945, Iraq)

Songs of My Love, The / Les chants de mon
amour / Angham habibi (Mohamed Selmane, 1959, Lebanon)
Sous le ciel de Damas / Under the Skies of
Damascus / Tahta sama Dimask (Ismal
Anzur, 1931, Syria)
Sous le toit / Under the Ceiling / Tahta al-saqf
(Nidal al-Dibs, 2005, Syria)
Sous les bombes / Under the Bombs / Taht elqasef (Philippe Aractingi, 2007, Lebanon)
Sous-exposition / Underexposure / Ghair salih
(Oday Rasheed, 2004, Iraq)
South in Revolt, The / Le sud rvolt / alJanoub al-thaer (Rida Myassar, 1984,
Lebanon)
Souvenirs / Memories / Zikrayat (Georges
Souvenirs dune nuit damour / Memories of a
Night of Love (Seif-Eddine Chawkat, 1973,
Syria)
Stars in Broad Daylight / toiles du jour /
Nujum al-nahar (Oussama Mohammad,
1988, Syria)
Story of a Dream / Histoire dun rve / Tarick
hulm (Nabil al-Maleh, 1983, Syria)
Story of a Return, The / Histoire dun retour
/ An al-awan (Jean-Claude Codsi, 1994,
Lebanon)
Story of a Star, The a.k.a. Once upon a Time,
Beirut / Il tait une fois Beyrouth, histoire
dune star / Kan ya makan Beirut a.k.a.
Lebanon)
Stranger in the House, A / Une trangre la
maison / Fil dar ghariba (Joseph Fahdi,
1961, Lebanon)
Street of Dreams, The / La rue des rves / Triq
al-Ahlam (Harri Sarkisian, in Lebanon,
1973, Iraq)
Struggle in Jarash, The / Combat Djrash /
Siraa fi Jarash (Ibrahim Hassan Sirhan,
1958, Jordan)
Struggle till Liberation / Lutte jusqu la
libration / Kifah hatta al-Tahrir (Abdel
Wahab al-Hindi, 1969, Jordan)
Sultana (Safa Mohamed Ali, 1962, Iraq)
Sultana / Sultana (Riad Myassar, 1966, Lebanon)
185
Summer in Lebanon / Lt au Liban (Salah
Badrakhan, 1946, Lebanon)
Suspended Life, A a.k.a. Teenage Flirtation /
Une vie suspendue a.k.a. Ladolescente, sucre damour / Ghazal al-bant 2 (Jocelyne
Saab, 1985, Lebanon)
Sweet Like a Berry, My Love / Doux comme un
baie, mon amour / Habibati ya hab al-tout
(Marwan Haddad, 1979, Syria)
Tailleur pour les dames / Womens Tailor (Atef
Salem, 1969, Syria),
Take Pity on Me / Ayez piti de moi / Irhamoini (Hyder al-Omer, 1958, Iraq)
Tale of the Three Jewels, The / Conte des trois
diamants / Hikayat al-jawaher al-thalatha
(Michel Khleifi, 1996, Palestine)
Tango du dsir / Tango of Yearning (Mohmed
Souweid, 1998, Lebanon)
Tango of Yearning / Tango du dsir (Mohmed
Souweid, 1998, Lebanon)
Teenage Flirtation a.k.a. A Suspended Life /
Une vie suspendue a.k.a. Ladolescente, sucre damour / Ghazal al-bant 2 (Jocelyne
Tents of Qaraqoz, The / Les tentes de Qaraqoz
/ Khaymatu Quaraqoz (Mohamed Shahin,
1974, Syria)
Terminator (Katia Jarjoura, 2006, Lebanon)
Terra incognita / al-Ard al-majhoula (Ghassan Salhab, 2002, Lebanon)
Thirst / Soif / Atash (Tawfik Abu Wael, 2004,
Palestine)
Thirsty Ones, The / Les assoiffs / al-Damiun
Threads Beneath the Sands / Des fils sous le
sable / Khyoot taht al rimal (Khalifa alMeraikly, 2006, Qatar)
Three Operations in Palestine / Trois Oprations en Palestine / Thalath amaliyyatdkhil Filistin (Mohamed Salah and Abderrahman al-Khayali, 1969, Syria)
Ticket to Jerusalem, A / Un ticket pour Jrusalem / Tathkararaton ila al-Quds (Rashid
Time That Remains, The / Le temps quil reste
/ al-Zaman al-baqi (Elia Suleiman, 2009,
Palestine)
186
Tiswahen (Hussen al-Samara, 1956, Iraq)

Today / Aujourdhui (Akram Zaatari, 2003,
Lebanon) (documentary)
Toi, ma vie / You Are My Life / Anta omri
Tomber de la terre / Falling from Earth / Waala el-ard el-samaa (Chadi Zeneddine,
2007, Lebanon)
Tornado, The / Le tourbillon / al-Isar (Samir
Habchi, 1992, Lebanon)
Toutes mes mres / All My Mothers / Hameye madrana-e man (Ebrahim Saeedi and
Zahavi Sanjavi, 2009, Iraq) (documentary)
Towards the Unknown / Vers linconnu / Ila
ayn (Georges Nasser, 1958, Lebanon)
Tramps, The / Les vagabonds / al-Charidan
Trap, The / Le pige / al-Masyada (Wadeih
Yousef, 1979, Syria)
Trois Oprations en Palestine / Three Operations in Palestine / Thalath amaliyyatdkhil Filistin (Mohamed Salah and Abderrahman al-Khayali, 1969, Syria)
Turning, The / Le tournant / al-Munataf
(Jafar Ali, 1974, Iraq)
Two Friends, The / Les deux amis (Hassan alSafi, 1970, Syria),
Two Hearts, One Body / Deux curs, un corps
Two Moons and an Olive Tree / Deux lunes et
un olivier / Qamarn wa zayrunah (Abdellatif Abdelhamid, 2001, Syria).
Un amour tout particulier / A Very Particular
Love / Gharmit khasa jidan (Fayal alYassiri, 1974, Iraq)
Un autre jour / Another Day / Yawm akhar
(Sahib Haddad, 1978, Iraq)
Un conte de Bahrain / Bahraini Tale / Hekaya
Bahrainiya (Bassam al-Thawadi, 2008,
Bahrain)
Un homme convenable / A Useful Man (Helmi
Rafla, 1970, Syria)
Un homme perdu / A Lost Man (Danielle
Arbid, 2007, Lebanon)
Un jour nouveau dans le vieux Sanaa / A New
Day in Old Sanaa (Bader Ben Hirsi, 2005,
Yemen)
Un jour parfait / A Perfect Day / Yawm akhar

(Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige,
2005, Lebanon)
Un jour pluvieux / On a Rainy Day / Fi
yawmin mumtir (Mohamed Shahin, 1984,
Syria)
Un mariage forc / A Forced Marriage (Rida
Myassar, 1973, Syria)
Un meutre pas pas / A Murder Step by Step /
Qatlun ... an tariq al-tasalsul (Mohamed
Un pays, les plaies, un dplacement / A Country above Wounds / Watan fawq al-jirah
(Soubhi Seifeddine, 1983, Lebanon)
Un peu de force / The House / Cha min alquwwah (Karlo Hartyon, 1988, Iraq)
Un rossignol du Liban / A Nightingale in Lebanon / Boulbol min Loubnan (Rida Myassar,
1982, Lebanon)
Un ticket pour Jrusalem / A Ticket to Jerusalem / Tathkararaton ila al-Quds (Rashid
Un voyageur silencieux / A Silent Traveller
(Ibrahim Salman, 1992, Iraq).
Uncle Vania and Co.s Circus / Le cirque de
loncle Vania et cie / Cirque al-ame Vania
wa chourakah (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1991,
Lebanon)
Under the Bombs / Sous les bombes / Taht elqasef (Philippe Aractingi, 2007, Lebanon)
Under the Ceiling / Sous le toit / Tahta al-safr
(Nidal al-Dibs, 2005, Syria)
Under the Skies of Damascus / Sous le ciel
de Damas / Tahta sama Dimask (Ismal
Anzur, 1931, Syria)
Underexposure / Sous-exposition / Ghair salih
(Oday Rasheed, 2004, Iraq)
Une autre facette de lamour / Another Facet
of Love / Wahj akhar lil-hob (Mohamed
Une bdouine Paris / A Bedouin Girl in Paris
/ Badawia fi Baris (Mohamed Selmane,
1964, Lebanon)
Une bdouine Rome / A Bedouin Girl in
Rome / Badawia fi Roma (Mohamed Selmane, 1965, Lebanon)
Une belle et des gants / A Beauty and Some
Giants / Hassnaa wa amalika (Samir alGhoussayni, 1980, Lebanon)

Une chanson dans la tte / Melodrama Habibi
(Hany Tamba, 2008, Lebanon)
Une trangre la maison / A Stranger in the
House / Fil dar ghariba (Joseph Fahdi,
1961, Lebanon)
Une femme chez un monstre / A Woman with
a Monster / Imraa fi bayt imlak (Zinardi
Habis, 1983, Lebanon)
Une femme seule / A Woman Alone (Nagdi
Hafez, 1971, Syria)
Une histoire orientale / An Oriental Story /
Hikya sharqiyya (Najdat Ismal Anzur,
Jordan, 1991)
Une rose de la ville / A City Rose / Zahratun
min al-madina (Mohamed Shahin, 1964,
Syria)
Une traverse en bus de lIran / Iranian
Journey (Maysoon Pachachi, 1999, Iraq)
(documentary)
Une vie suspendue a.k.a. Ladolescente, sucre
damour / A Suspended Life a.k.a. Teenage
Flirtation / Ghazal al-bant 2 (Jocelyne
Until the End of the Day a.k.a. Nightfall /
Jusquau dclin du jour (Mohamed Souweid, 2000, Lebanon) (documentary).
Useful Man, A / Un homme convenable
(Helmi Rafla, 1970, Syria)
Vagues / Waves / Amwage (Mohamed Selmane, 1970, Lebanon)
Valuable Game / Gibier de valeur / al-Istiyad
al-kabir (Rida Myassar, 1974, Lebanon)
Veiled Man, The / Lhomme voil / al-Rajul
al-muhajjah (Maroun Bagdadi, 1987,
Lebanon)
Vendetta damour / Vendetta of Love / alIntiqam hubban (Wadeih Yousef, 1985,
Syria).
Vendetta of Love / Vendetta damour / alIntiqam hubban (Wadeih Yousef, 1985,
Syria).
Verbal Messages / Messages verbal / Rasail al
Shafahyya (Abdellatif Abdelhamid, 1991,
Syria)
Verger damour / Orchard of Love / Karm alhawa (Mohamed Selmane, 1970, Lebanon)
Vers linconnu / Towards the Unknown / Ila
ayn (Georges Nasser, 1958, Lebanon)
187
Very Particular Love, A / Un amour tout particulier / Gharmit khasa jidan (Fayal
Victory in His Eyes / La victoire dans ses yeux
/ Al nasr fi unynihim (Samir Nasr, 1976,
Palestine)
Victory of the Vanquished, The / La victoire
du vaincu / Intissar al-mounhazem (Samir
Nasri, 1966, Lebanon)
Vigilant Eye, The / Lil vigilant / al-Ayn alsahira (Gary Garabdian, 1963, Lebanon)
Visa for Paradise / Visa pour paradis (Saad
Salman, 1982, Iraq) (documentary)
Visa pour paradis / Visa for Paradise (Saad
Salman, 1982, Iraq) (documentary)
Vision, The / La vision / al-Rouya (Youssef
Visions chimriques / Dreamy Visions / Raa
halima (Waha al-Raheb, 2003, Syria)
Visitor, The / La visiteuse (Henri Barakat,
1972, Lebanon)
Vive la marie ... et la libration du Kurdistan / Long Live the Bride ... and the
Liberation of Kurdistan / (Hiner Saleem,
1997, Iraq)
Vodka citron / Vodka Lemon (Hiner Saleem,
2003, Iraq)
Vodka Lemon / Vodka citron (Hiner Saleem,
2003, Iraq)
Vos papiers / I.D. (Ghassan Shmeit, 2007,
Syria)
Voyage damour / Journey of Love (Youssef
Voyage des souffrances / Voyage of Suffering
(Rida Myassar, 1974, Syria)
Voyage of Suffering / Voyage des souffrances
(Rida Myassar, 1974, Syria)
Waiting / Attente / Intizar (Rashid
Walls, The / Les murs a.k.a. Les remparts /
al-Aswar (Mohamed Choukri Jamil, 1979,
Iraq)
War in Lebanon, The / La guerre au Liban /
Harb Lubnn (Samir Nasr, 1977, Palestine)
War, Love, God and Madness / Guerre, amour,
dieu, et folie (Mohamed al-Daradji, 2009,
Iraq) (documentary)
188
Warda (Tahya Faq, 1956, Iraq)

Watchmans Daughter, The / La fille du gardien / Bint al-hares (Henri Barakat, 1968,
Lebanon)
Waves / Vagues / Amwage (Mohamed Selmane, 1970, Lebanon)
tous des fdayins / Koullouna fidaiyyoun
(Gary Garabedian, 1969, Lebanon)
We Shall Return One Day / Nous retournerons
un jour (Samir Abdallah and Walid Charara, 1998, Lebanon) (documentary)
Wedding in Galilee / Noce en Galile / Urs aljalil (Michel Khleifi, 1987, Palestine)
Wedding in Ramallah, A / Farah fi Ramallah
(Shirin Salameh, 2000, Palestine) (documentary)
Wedding of Zein, The / Les noces de Zein / Urs
al-Zayn (Khalid al-Siddick, 1976, Kuwait)
Wedding Proposal / Projet de mariage /
Mashro zawadj (Kameran Hassani, 1962,
Iraq)
Welcome to Love / Bienvenue lamour (Mohamed Selmane, 1968, Lebanon)
West Beyrouth / Beyrouth al-gharbiya (Ziad
Doueiri, 1998, Lebanon)
Wet Nurse, The / La nourrice / al-Mardaa (Ali
Nasser, 1993, Palestine)
Wheedler, The / Lenjleuse / al-Daloua (Mohamed Selmane, 1966, Lebanon)
When Maryam Spoke Out / Quand Maryam
sest dvoile / Lamma hikyit Maryam
(Assad Fouladkar, 2001, Lebanon)
When the People Spoke / Lorsque le peuple a
parl / Indama rtakalam al-shaab (Amer
al-Zuhair, 2007, Kuwait) (documentary)
White Poison, The / Le poison blanc / al-Sam
al-abiad (Georges Kahi, 1961, Lebanon)
Who Is Responsible? / Qui est responsable? /
Man al-masoul? (Abdl Jaber Wali, 1956,
Iraq)
Who Puts Out the Fire? / Qui teint le feu? /
Man youtfii al-nar (Mohamed Selmane,
1982, Lebanon)
Will of the People, The / La volont du peuple
/ Iradat al-chab (Borhan al-Din Jassem,
1959, Iraq)
Winter Women / Femmes dhiver / Nisaa lil

chitaa (Samir al-Ghoussayni, 1974, Lebanon)
Wolves Do Not Eat Raw Meat / Les loups
ne mangent pas la chair frache / Ziab
la taakol al-lahm (Samir Khoury, 1972,
Lebanon)
Woman Alone, A / Une femme seule (Nagdi
Hafez, 1971, Syria)
Woman Thief, The / La voleuse / al-Sarika
(Youssef Charafeddine, 1991, Lebanon)
Woman with a Monster, A / Une femme chez
un monstre / Imraa fi bayt imlak (Zinardi
Habis, 1983, Lebanon)
Women Naked without Sin / Femmes nues
sans pch (Koshav, 1967, Syria)
Womens Intrigue / La manigance des femmes
/ Loubat al-nisaa (Samir al-Ghoussayni,
1982, Lebanon)
Womens Tailor / Tailleur pour les dames (Atef
Salem, 1969, Syria),
Words of Love / Des mots de lamour / Kalam
fi hub (Mohamed Selmane and Sayed Tantawi, 1973, Lebanon)
World in the Year 2000, The / Le monde en
lan 2000 (Ahmed Fouad, 1972, Syria).
Wounded Ballerina, The / La ballerine blesse
/ Rqisa al al-firh (Mohamed Shahin,
1973, Syria)
/ crivains des frontires (Samir Abdalah
and Jose Reynes, 2004, Palestine) (documentary)
Wrong Way, The / Direction oppose / alIttijh al-mukis (Marwan Haddad, 1975,
Syria)
Yasmin / Jasmine (Nizar Hassan, 1998, Palestine)
Years / Des annes / Sinine (Georges Kahi,
1962, Lebanon)
You Are My Life / Toi, ma vie / Anta omri
Youth and Beauty / La jeunesse et la beaut
/ al-Siba wal jamal (Mohamed Selmane,
1965, Lebanon)
Youth in the Sun / Jeunesse au soleil / Chabab
tahtal cham (Samir Nasi, 1966, Lebanon)

Zaman, lhomme aux roseaux / Zaman, the
Reed Man (Amer Alwan, 2003, Iraq)
Zaman, the Reed Man / Zaman, lhomme aux
roseaux (Amer Alwan, 2003, Iraq)
Zeinab and the River / Zeinab et le fleuve /
Zaynab wa-l-nahr (Christine Dabague,
1997, Lebanon)
189
Zeinab et le fleuve / Zeinab and the River /
Zaynab wa-l-nahr (Christine Dabague,
1997, Lebanon)
Zozo (Josef Fars, 2005, Lebanon)
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Roy Armes is Professor Emeritus of Film at

Middlesex University. He has published widely
on world cinema for the past 40 or so years,
and this is his twentieth book. His most recent
publications are Postcolonial Images: Studies in
North African Film (2005), African Filmmaking:
North and South of the Sahara (2006), and
Dictionary of African Filmmakers (2008), all
published by Indiana University Press.

Arab Filmmakers of The Middle East

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Film and Media Middle East

Jacket illustration: Jmour. India ink and acrylic

Arab Filmmakers MECH hi-res.indd 1

from the introduction

The fragmented history of Arab

Roy Armes is Professor Emeritus of Film

Esential for libraries and useful

In this landmark dictionary, Roy Armes

the filmmakers and their feature films.

and French with details about the director,

Bloomington and Indianapolis

This book is a publication of

Man ufactur ed in the

But we suffer from an incurable disease

Like its predecessor, the Dictionary of African

of Arab Women Filmmakers (Cairo: American

This dictionary concentrates primarily on the

Carthage, Tunis, 2004, 2006, and 2008) show

Front de Libration Nationale

University of California, Los

Ber na r d Lew is, The Mu ltiple Identities of

This dictionary is concerned with the films

powers, which, after World War I, arbitrarily

Arab Filmmakers of the Middle East

First Contact with the Cinema

and a first public screening was arranged at

Arab Filmmakers of the Middle East

Arab Filmmakers of the Middle East

Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria and

and Catholics with traditional links to France,

The Broken Wings (1962, Lebanon)

Arab Filmmakers of the Middle East

Ziad Doueiri, who was 12 when the Lebanese

Centre National du Cinma (CNC), attached

state in Lebanon, as they had done in Jordan.

Under the Bombs (2007, Lebanon)

ed by Ross: God laughed when He created the

ness, gradually revealing their personal lives

had been achieved. Perhaps one hundred fifty

Arab Filmmakers of the Middle East

Swedish television before completing her first

The Extras (1993, Syria)

of Sharif Hussein of Mecca and leader of the

eraments are gradually revealed, both to each

and a half years later. Syria has continued to

Arab Filmmakers of the Middle East

Mohamed Malass second feature film, The

ham and Nouhad Kalahi, who had begun their

in 1968 were for the Soviet film school, the

by Yves Thoraval as Boshko Votchinitch, by

The Nights of the Jackal (1989, Syria)

actual military occupation. Al-Assad came

ond one gets pregnant, elopes, and is later

tional model the Soviet Communist Party, in

Arab Filmmakers of the Middle East

individual personal styles. Though itself a

Arab Filmmakers of the Middle East

Mohamed Choukri Jamil began his career as a

for the public sector in the following years.

English director of photography Jack Hilyard

of modern wars,49 resulted in huge suffering

Dreams (2005, Iraq)

communist, executed by the Baathist regime.